Using Quartz Within a Web Application

By now, you've seen many examples of Quartz running as a stand-alone application in a J2SE environment. In Chapter 10, "Using Quartz with J2EE," you also learned that Quartz can function well running within a J2EE environment. But what we haven't shown you is how to deploy Quartz within a Java Web application (normally abbreviated as Web app). That is the sole intent of this chapter.

You might want to integrate Quartz within a Web application for several reasons. A few of the more obvious ones are listed here:

• To schedule and launch jobs using a GUI interface
• To improve job management and monitoring
• To make it easier for multiple users to schedule jobs
• To schedule jobs from within your own Web applications

The primary use of Quartz within a Web app is, of course, to allow easier scheduling and maintenance of jobs through a GUI interface. Other secondary reasons include better management of running and scheduled jobs, as well as quicker notification when things go wrong. In general, the same reasons that you would want to put a GUI around any software application can be generalized for applications using Quartz: to make it easier to use the application.