Scheduling a Job using spring

Requirement:

We have to send email on a regular interval by checking a condition automatically.

Solution:
We can use Queartz Job scheduler which is an open source job scheduling library and can be attached with any java application.

Alternatively we can use Spring's Task scheduler using TaskScheduler and TaskExecutor.

Pros:

• This approach is good for the situation where you are already using Spring in code. 
• Its quick and easy to implement.
• You do not have many jobs to run.

To implement the spring way we should use @EnableScheduling annotation in our AppConfig.java
The above annotation enables Spring's scheduled task execution capability.

Below is an example which gets executed every hours and prints the current time.

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package blogspot.thinkwithjava; import java.text.SimpleDateFormat; import java.util.Date; import org.slf4j.Logger; import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory; import org.springframework.scheduling.annotation.Scheduled; import org.springframework.stereotype.Component; /** * * @author R.D * */ @Component public class ScheduledTasks { private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(ScheduledTasks.class); private static final SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("HH:mm:ss"); @Scheduled(cron = "0 0 0/1 1/1 * ?") public void reportCurrentTime() { log.info("The time is now {}", dateFormat.format(new Date())); } }

cron = "0 0 0/1 1/1 * ?"

To schedule a task we provide a cron pattern as mentioned above. The pattern is a list of six single space-separated fields: representing second, minute, hour, day, month, weekday. Month and weekday names can be given as the first three letters of the English names.

Cron pattern for every Five Minute

"0 0/5 * 1/1 * ?"

Cron pattern for every hour

 "0 0 0/1 1/1 * ?"

Cron pattern for every four hour

"0 0 0/4 1/1 * ?"

More information is given here.

Remove duplicate character from a given string

This is one of the tricky question asked in the interviews. Not only to check logical ability of candidates but to check their understanding about algorithms and complexities.

So here is the Problem statement:

 How to remove duplicate characters from String in Java? For example, if given String is "aaaaaa" then output should be "a", because rest of  the "a" are duplicates. Similarly, if the input is "abcd" then output should also be "abcd"  because there is no duplicate character in this String.

Algorithm:

 This algorithm goes through each character of String to check if its a duplicate of already found character. It skip the duplicate character by inserting 0, which is later used to filter those characters and update the non-duplicate character. 

Time Complexity of this solution is O(n^2), excluded to UniqueString() method, which creates String from character array. 

This method will work even if String contains more than one duplicate character.

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/** * * Java Program to remove duplicate characters from String. * * @author Ram.Dutt */ public class RemoveDuplicateChar { public static void main(String args[]) { String[] testdata = { "aabaaaaascs", "abcd", "aaaa", null, "", "aaabbb", "abababa" }; for (String input : testdata) { System.out.printf("Input : %s Output: %s %n", input, removeDuplicates(input)); } System.out.println("Calling removeDuplicatesFromString(String str)."); for (String input : testdata) { System.out.printf("Input : %s Output: %s %n", input, removeDuplicatesFromString(input)); } } public static String removeDuplicates(String word) { if (word == null || word.length() < 2) { return word; } int pos = 1; // possible position of duplicate character char[] characters = word.toCharArray(); for (int i = 1; i < word.length(); i++) { int j; for (j = 0; j < pos; ++j) { if (characters[i] == characters[j]) { break; } } if (j == pos) { characters[pos] = characters[i]; ++pos; } else { characters[pos] = 0; ++pos; } } return toUniqueString(characters); } /* * * This solution assumes that given input String only contains * ASCII * characters. You should ask this question to your Interviewer, * if he * says ASCII then this solution is Ok. This Algorithm * uses additional * memory of constant size. */ public static String removeDuplicatesFromString(String input) { if (input == null || input.length() < 2) { return input; } boolean[] ASCII = new boolean[256]; char[] characters = input.toCharArray(); ASCII[input.charAt(0)] = true; int dupIndex = 1; for (int i = 1; i < input.length(); i++) { if (!ASCII[input.charAt(i)]) { characters[dupIndex] = characters[i]; ++dupIndex; ASCII[characters[i]] = true; } else { characters[dupIndex] = 0; ++dupIndex; } } return toUniqueString(characters); } /* * * Utility method to convert Character array to String, omitting * NUL * character, ASCII value 0. */ public static String toUniqueString(char[] letters) { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(letters.length); for (char c : letters) { if (c != 0) { sb.append(c); } } return sb.toString(); } }

That is it. You can use different logic too to remove duplicate values from the array in Java as well.

Happy reading!

String pool differences in java 6 and java 7

While reading a blog here, I found a quite interesting improvements in String Pool

String pool is relocated to Java heap space from PermGen space.

The default size of String pool is increased to 600013 entries from 1009 in Java 6.

The -XX:StringTableSize JVM option is provided to specify the size of String pool.