History of the Quartz Framework

As with many other open source projects in use today, Quartz started out as a simple solution for one individual. With the rise of open source initiatives and the generosity of key individuals, Quartz has become a very public framework that many people use to help solve a much larger problem.

Quartz was created by James House, who envisioned the first conceptual pieces of the framework in 1998. These included the concept of a queue of jobs and a pool of threads to process the jobs, although probably in an unrecognizable form by most of today's Quartz users.

Over the next several years, House noted that he kept running into the same requirement: the need for a flexible job-scheduling tool. His search for a cheap but feature-rich job-scheduling framework for Java led him to several alternatives:

• A costly commercial tool
• An embedded solution tied to a larger (and unneeded) framework
• UNIX Cron or Windows Scheduler
• A custom solution of his own

House's limited choices and interest in the problem prompted him to create an open source project for job scheduling. In spring 2001, he created the project and registered it on SourceForge. The site is still viewable today at http://sourceforge.net/projects/quartz, but it is no longer maintained there.

Since Quartz first was developed, numerous contributors and developers have added to the project. It's safe to say, however, that the framework exists as it does today thanks to House and his interest in the job scheduling problem. His determination to solve the problem in the public arena is commendable.