Spring Scheduling in WebSphere
When building a batch component for a Spring application running on IBM WebSphere I came across a few problems that I found worth sharing. Mostly due to lack of proper and consistent documentation I spent some time researching something that proved to be pretty trivial. Hence this short article to explain how to set up an application utilizing the Spring Scheduling integration on WebSphere.
The Spring Scheduling documentation mentions the Quartz Scheduler and the JDK Timer as the two preferred ways to obtain scheduling in a Spring application. However, both of these approaches will, according to this article, lead to unmanaged threads in WebSphere and should be avoided. Fortunately Spring also has some support for the CommonJ API (specification jointly created by BEA and IBM), which is the only recommended solution for the WebSphere platform.
The documentation on how to utilize the Spring CommonJ integration on WebSphere was pretty sparse. The rest of this article will try to fill the gaps in this documentation.