Re: Advanced Job Scheduler

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 11:01 AM, Rob Berendt <rob@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

When you already
have the free job scheduler (WRKJOBSCDE) why use Google calendar for basic
scheduling?

Two reasons:

(1) Because the basic job scheduler only has very rudimentary ways to
specify when you want to run things. Try doing "run on the last
Thursday of every month". How about "run every other Thursday"? Or
even "run every year on April 15". This is what Brad meant when he
said the calendar portion is the most complex part of any job
scheduler. (Incidentally, I am not sure I agree that this is the
*most* complex part, but I certainly believe it is *a* complex part.
Most programmers I've encountered, either from talking to them or
looking at their code, have a lot of trouble rolling their own date
calculations.)

(2) Because the basic job scheduler has an arcane, green-screen-only
interface (unless you write your own custom programs to wrap it up
more nicely). Whereas Google Calendar is relatively friendly to use
from a number of devices, including smart phones.

It's true that AJS has the job dependencies thing, and its calendar
features are much more robust than the basic scheduler. I think AJS is
a great fit for many shops, and I'm guessing it is more economical
than Robot. Whether AJS is a better fit or more economical than Brad's
stuff is another issue (or two other issues).

Right now, for my own use, I am kind of stuck using the basic
scheduler to launch programs, and then in those programs, I put in my
own custom logic to handle more complex date stuff. (Typically, I use
the scheduler to run something more often than I need, and then my
custom logic aborts on the extraneous occurrences.)

John Y.