Writing scheduled tasks in JIRA

Have you ever thought of running scheduled tasks within JIRA? Why do we need scheduled tasks when we have the JIRA Services? We have seen how to write a service in the previous recipe. But in spite of all the advantages we discussed so far, these services have a disadvantage. It always starts when JIRA is restarted and runs at regular intervals after that. So, if you have a service that does some heavy memory-intensive operation and if you restart JIRA in the middle of the day, you will suddenly find your instance's performance compromised! If it is scheduled to run every 24 hours, you will find the same service running in the middle of the day from then on until the next restart.

Scheduled tasks in JIRA are a good way to make sure all such operations happen at quite times, midnight, for example. In this chapter, we will write a simple scheduled task and see how easy that can be!

How to do it...

Let us write a simple scheduled task that prints a line in the console...