Can anyone recommend an open source C- or Java-based scheduler for embedding as the heart of another program?

Can someone recommend an open source scheduler that would lend itself to being embedded

as the heart of a specialized web based scheduler? A C- or Java-based scheduler would be my

first choice to work with.

The finished project would allow someone, via the internet, to add, delete and change tasks scheduled on the local machine by monthly, weekly, daily, and by time of day. The tasks would be fairly simple: to display messages and play WAV files on the local machine on scheduled dates and at times specified by the remote programmer.

Ok, why? Well, my wife and myself moved her mother to our town a couple of years ago, because she could not or would not tend to her own affairs including eating and taking her insulin on a rigorous schedule. She is a type one diabetic. She is a widow and had been living by herself for about ten years. My wife had been tending to her bills and affairs remotely from our home a thousand miles away. My mother-in-law had a dozen different doctors that did not of one another and she was being way over-medicated with one medication counteracting another. We found out that she had not been careful with her diabetes and that this had resulted in a trip by EMS to the emergency room on the average of every other month. Strangely, she is not totally senile, though her short term memory is pretty much shot, but, she is, and always has been, a "dyed-in-the-wool" slacker. My wife and I, both, work full time jobs, from before daylight until after dark, still, my wife manages to call her mother three times a day, to tell her to eat and take her insulin and then spends about two hours each evening with her mother before coming home. This machine would be, essentially a headless system that served no function other than to flash pre-programmed messages to small monitor and play audio "nags" at the appropriate times. "Get up and your eat breakfast", "It's time to do your insulin", "Give the dog its pill", "Get ready to go to your doctors appointment" and so on. With no keyboard or mouse and the front panel switches disabled, she is enough of a Luddite that I don't think that she will think of pulling the cord out of the wall socket.

Anyway, that's where I'm trying to go. I'm a reluctant programmer, but, I have written some large and complex programs over the years and in a number of different languages and to make the wife's life a bit easier开发者_高级运维, I can do this. A scheduler that could be modified to become a large block of code within the overall program, would save me a great deal of time and head scratching.

Get a Linux box, SSH in to it, and add entries to the crontab. As for the alerting program, that'll be specific to your task.

You got me interested. We're looking into Spring Batch at the office, but that's less about scheduling jobs and more about heavy processing. I checked out the FAQ, which led me to Quartz... it looks pretty nifty. Here are its features: http://www.quartz-scheduler.org/overview/features.html

Quartz, as mentioned by Dondo is a kind of industry standard for scheduling. It's very popular and used a lot.

Alternatively you could use the Timer API that comes with Java EE. This is a fairly basic thing, but still quite powerful. See this for a small example SIMPLEST POSSIBLE EJB 3.1 TIMER.

Java EE also gives you the tools to easily create a GUI (via Java server faces) and to have some CRUD logic to enter new tasks into your system and persist them with the Java persistence API to a DB.

Of course, if you don't have any experience yet with Java EE (or Spring, or Quartz) simply learning those technologies may be more time consuming than actually building what you have in mind.