RE: Advanced Job Scheduler

One thought.

If you combine the hourly rate of all the folks that have opined about AJS and how to avoid buying it by creating their own flavor of it in this thread, you would already have paid for it.

Cron: Great go for it. Options are good
Google Calendar: Again great, sounds like a really cool extension to current function
Homegrown: Neat, sounds like it could be very cool and do exactly what you need

In any case by the time you're done, AJS was paid for long before you got your solution done, and you don't have to maintain it.

Open source is cool and great, but as a manager I would rather have you work ON the business, not IN the business doing things other folks have already completed. Use open source where it makes sense. Node.js, Python, GCC all provide you with more tools to do the best thing for the business but only when another solution is not a better fit.

Now if you're in the business of providing tools and things to sell to the IBM i install base, even better to innovate and create and sell.

If you're an end customer, then strongly consider how much you're spending on creating your tools vs. doing things that will directly make money for your employer. Classic buy/build decision. With tools like these, buy almost always is the better business decision.

--
Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects


-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Aaron Bartell
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2016 12:33 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Advanced Job Scheduler

​Sounds like we need to port cron to IBM i.

​

Aaron Bartell
litmis.com - Services for open source on IBM i


On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 12:18 PM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

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.
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