Job scheduling is nothing new--most enterprise applications require the scheduling of tasks and activities. For example, your application may need a timer service to run a business process once a day, or to clean up a temporary table when your application is initialized. UNIX's designers popularized job scheduling by making it simple with cron, and Oracle took this approach further by introducing database jobs and events with the Oracle database.

This article Using Timers in J2EE Applications discusses how can you use a timer service in your J2EE 1.4 applications to schedule business task and activities.