Scheduling tasks in Java

Question

I have written a code in Java, something like this:

....
while (conditionX) {
  //fetch m
  ....
  t = new Thread(new SomeRunnable(m));
  t.start();
  Thread.sleep(500);
}
....

class SomeRunnable implements Runnable {
  String msisdn;
  public SomeRunnable (String m) {
    msisdn = m;
  }
  @Override
  public void run() {
    do {
      //Statement block S uses msisdn, sets condition Y
      Thread.sleep(30000);    
    } while (conditionY);
  }
}

I am not comfortable with the number Thread.sleep() s I have used in the code. To avoid this I tried ScheduledExecutor etc, but couldn't really figure out a way to do what I want.
I need half a second delay before a new thread is started , and in the thread, there has to be a 30s delay before the statement block S is tried again .

Please help me with a better way to code this using proper classes.
I have only provided an idea of how my code's work flow is, if I've to provide more info, please let me know.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can implement a TimerTask and override run() . Then you can schedule the task periodically with:

Timer myTimer = new Timer();
timer.scheduleAtFixedRate(new MyTimerTask(), 500L, 30000L);

When you want to cancel your task, you can do that by calling cancel()

Answer 2

If you are using Spring to configure your beans you can focus just on implementing your business logic and leverage Spring's hooks for managing the tasks, schedules, etc.

http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/1.2.x/reference/scheduling.html