For a moderately sophisticated web application, you will generally have some tasks which you need to be run on a regular basis. In Java you have the quartz framework. In .NET, I hear they rely on the Windows Scheduler to schedule regular jobs. How about Linux, PHP? I am aware that we can probably do a wget in the crontab, but.. is there a better way? Edward did mention something about drupal having some kind of cron implementation… so just wanted to dig a little deeper into that…
Well, hmmm.. turns out that drupal way… is basically just leveraging on the crontab. Nothing new. Relying totally on the OS scheduling mechanism. :P
But found something quite interesting though… they call it a Poor Man’s Implementation of Cron. Basically, it is treating each page view as a possible trigger point for scheduled jobs, since PHP codes are executed on each browser request. Apparently both drupal and joomla has their own implementation.. but of course, it will not work for a more serious project like ours…
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/847/details
http://drupal.org/project/poormanscron
