Running J2EE code on timed event - how?

[Daniel Bovenzi]

What is the best mechanism to run a piece of code on a J2EE box at regular intervals?
Is this covered by the J2EE spec or would, for instance, a "scheduled servlet/EJB" be vendor specific functionality?
For background info:
I am trying to develop an FTP feed that will run every 30 mins (probably no an IBM WS4 box), pull in XML docs via FTP and inset data into an RDBMS.
I have the FTP->XML->JDBC code sorted - I just need to put it into something that will run on a schedule.

[Chris Mathews]

This will be explicitly covered in EJB 2.1. For now we accomplish this using JMX with Timer MBeans, it is pretty powerful. You could also use a product such as Quartz or Flux.

[pjoisha]

For EJB 1.1 based servers one plausible solution
is to Timer class in one of your helper classes ...
PJ