Can't Get On The Apex Scheduler Pilot? Here's a Short Term Solution.

November 24th, 2009

In Winter ’10, Salesforce.com released the Apex Scheduler. This feature allows you to schedule Apex classes to run at specific times. The features appears to be widely popular (200+ votes on the IdeaExchange) but is only in limited release. I’ve heard from a number of companies that they were not able to get on the pilot. The L1 Support Rep told me that an org would need 5000+ seats to qualify for the Apex Scheduler.

Hopefully Apex Scheduler will be GA next release but in the meantime here’s a short-term solution that Kyle Roche and I were discussing last week. You can sign up for a free Google App Engine account and then schedule tasks with cron in either Java or Python.

The solution is relative straight forward and you can find all the info you need in our book Beginning Java Google App Engine. We not only cover cron jobs but have a number of examples using the Force.com for Google App Engine Java toolkit.

Pre-order your copy now just in time for Christmas. It goes nicely with eggnog and figgy pudding.

Categories: Apex, Google App Engine, Salesforce

5 Comments

Jakester November 24th, 2009
Another helpful article – thanks, Jeff! Just a friendly reminder that 2k points on the AppExchange means 200 votes – each vote is worth 10 pts. http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/75430/Scheduled_execution_of_Apex

It was great to meet you at Dreamforce!
jeffdonthemic November 24th, 2009
Thanks Jake! You are totally right about the votes. I’ll make the change. Nice to meet you also!
Sebastian November 24th, 2009
Jake,

We were able to get access the to the release even we have only 10 people by describing some business cases where we could use the scheduler.
Nick Simha December 10th, 2009
In terms of the pilot for any limited releases in general, the PM may make an exception for the right use case and provided they understand that it not GA yet- I would encourage those that need it to work with their account team.

However, this pattern of complementing Force.com with App Engine code is a very useful one. Has anyone tried porting the Data Loader on to the App Engine by any chance?

Thanks
Nick Simha
jeffdonthemic December 11th, 2009
Nick, I think that would be cool but I haven’t heard anyone talking about it yet.