The EJB 2.1 Specification: Finally Some Light

The EJB 2 1 Specification Finally Some Light

Chapter 22 of the EJB 2.1 specification discusses one of the new features to Enterprise JavaBeans, the Timer service. This service is a container-managed service that provides callbacks to components that need time-based events. This essentially means that EJBs can register themselves with the service and receive notifications when it's time for them to execute. The Timer service is implemented and managed by the EJB container. It's still pretty early to know how much functionality the J2EE vendors will add on top of these specifications. Some argue that the EJB Timer proposal is not currently sufficient, for the same reason that the java.util.Timer classes are not sufficient for a scheduling application. It would be nice to see the architects of the EJB specification add support for plugging in a framework such as Quartz to increase the flexibility of the Timer service.