Cron-jobbing your JSPs with GET
WOW. You learn something new every day, I was following my referrers to Steve Minutillo's RSS aggregator, Feed on Feeds and while reading about the PHP-based aggregator, I saw this:
20 * * * * /usr/local/bin/GET -C user:password http://minutillo.com/steve/fof/update-quiet.php
That is *so damn cool!* I don't know why I never put these pieces together, but I didn't... This is exactly what I'm doing tonight, but using Quartz and Java classes and .sh scripts, etc. It would never have dawned on me to use GET with a cron job and put the logic on my web server instead. It's just a fantastic hack. Think aggregating and moblogging and other random scheduled tasks. Now I can crank out a .JSP page on the server (which has the magic directory action I was talking about before), pop a couple lines into crontab and I'm done. In fact, I think I'll just set up a new secure webapp called "tasks" or something and just start throwing things in there.
Awesome.
-Russ