Cronacle beans
Just browsed to artima.com. Saw a google ad titled java scheduler. Clicked on it and arrived at redwood.com. Ha! Good! IT-eye is part of Redwood. This is the first time i saw a google ad for our product. I knew they have been working on it for quite some time, guess it’s realy finished now. Cronacle is an enterprise scheduler. I’ve seen quite some schedulers lately, but cronacle is the best i’ve used so far. Ofcourse i’m a bit biased… Cronacle beans is basically a java api to the cronacle scheduler.
Here’s why i think cronacle is a lot better than most batch schedulers:
- It’s very fast and can handle a very big load. We have customers running tens of thousands of jobs per hour. No problem. Try that with something like Dollar Universe or Concurrent Manager. No go. I’m currently forced to use concurrent manager on a project, i tried submitting 3000 jobs, and it killed the scheduler. So i had to create my own queue to avoid overloading the concurrent manager queue.
- It’s very open. It has an Oracle pl/sql api that allows you to schedule and reschedule jobs, monitor jobs, submit sub-jobs, handle errors, wait for others jobs to finish, etc. Also all information is available through tables and views in the database, so it’s very easy to query all jobs that ran yesterday which failed on machine X: select * from jcs_jobs where trunc(run_start) = trunc(sysdate-1) and status=’ERROR’ and resource=’X’. This allows you to create very complex job dependencies easily.
- Comes with a java portal that will allow you to submit new jobs and look at output generated by any job on any system in your network. And you get a taglibrary so you can integrate this within your own jsp applications.
- You can create all your objects using simple text files. This means you actually use normal version control systems, like cvs. I think this works a lot better than having to use a UI to move job definitions from dev, to stage, to prod. And you can easily see the differences between the different versions of you job definitions because it’s all available in cvs.
Good thing to be able to use this also from Java.
27 Aug 2003 |
October 13th, 2005 at 10:46 pm
Just read artical about Cronacle. I would in and Investment bank in a Front Office development team. Unfortunately the Cronacle Development is not done in our team, so we end up with Jobs like “spare_report.sh” in our batch cos sometimes we need to release something quickly and the other team does not have the resources!!!
Also they seem to be releasing everything by hand! Do you have some detailed info on how you would recommend CVS’ng a batch and how you would design a semi automatic release process from Dev to System Test to UAT to Production (and DR).
Also if you fancy a few month contract in London let me know!
November 7th, 2005 at 9:54 pm
This is one of the very few sites where I seen a discussion on Cronacle Beans. We have been using the product now with the last year and I have to say, if an enterprise has the budget, and from a Java point of view, they are interested in batch type applications, then they should seriously consider a CronacleBeans solution.
I have worked with Andrew Evers and we brought him on-site for a couple of days to walk through what Cronacle Beans has to offer and I have to say that I have always found him, and his staff, most helpful and knowledgeable.
We are currently working on a number of projects for a large dental insurance, using Redwood Cronacle Beans extensively to control and run their Java based batch type applications running in Oracle Application Server 10g and it’s great! Really performant and very easily managed.
If anyone is interested in chatting about these implementations or passing on some wisdom from their own experiences, please drop me a line.
November 12th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
Sorry for the delay in showing your reply, i get so much spam on this blog, i sometimes miss the good posts.
Good to see that you like the product.
November 14th, 2005 at 12:41 pm
No problem Andrej. The user community for Cronacle Beans seems to be quite small, in fact almost non-existant. Do you know of any user groups out there?
November 14th, 2005 at 1:23 pm
No, did you ask Redwood?
November 15th, 2005 at 11:57 am
Emailed Andrew and he is currently looking into creating a CronacleBeans user group. If I hear of anything, I’ll let you know.