Help with Cron Jobs for Java Google App Engine

Question

I am developing an application on google app engine and was just checking out cron jobs.

Looking at this document it seems pretty easy to schedule the jobs with config files and so on. My question is related to what I should actually put in the url the scheduled task triggers.

I was thinking a jsp which triggers a servlet that does whatever I need done, but not having a lot of experience with this technology I was wondering if there is a standard/better way of achieving this.

How are people doing things such as this?

Any help, pointers appreciated!

Answer 1

Your approach is just fine, and in line with Google's App Engine Cron Service documentation.

The Google App Engine is somewhat unusual place to run code, with all of its restrictions and such. The other 'normal' approaches for scheduling tasks in Java (external cron system, jcrontab, never ending loop with Thread.sleep(), etc.) are not possible.