Custom service for sending emails

[clau25]

I need to implement a custom service that must send emails on certain dates/times. My idea would be: the service starts a thread which has an infinite loop; in this loop it is checked if the System.currentTimeMillis() is equal with the time when a certain email must be send, and if yes, the email is sent.

I figured out that this idea is not good because everything else in server becomes very slow (because of this infinite loop). Could anyone give me a hint how to solve that?

Any help would be very much appreciated,
Claudia

[darranl]

You could use EJB timers, or you could work out how long till the mail needs to be send and call Thread.sleep.

[berkgypsy]

you should probably create a scheduled service

http://www.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Scheduler

[genman]

Or schedule the e-mail message using JMS. Create an MDB to send the e-mail when the JMS message is dequeued.

[clau25]

Thank you all for your answers.

I did it finally using the sleep() method of the Thread. I am not able to use EJBTimers yet because we use jboss 3.2.3 and as far as i know there are no EJBTimers in this version.

For genman: My service uses JMS for sending the emails. But it has to send a message to the queue at a certain specified time. From there, a MDB sends the email. So i need to make that check in a loop in service in order to see when the time for sending the email is the same as the current time.

Claudia