I'm certainly not the
first person to say this, but it bears repeating, using
Timer in the post Java 5 world is not a good idea. I got bitten by
Timer's lack of exception handling again recently. If you must use a
Timer and are relying on it to be long-lived, make sure the
run() methods on your tasks can't throw any unchecked exceptions, because if any exceptions manage to leak out of the
run() method, the timer thread will terminate and no more tasks will run. I used to use
Timer in situations where I wanted to be able to cancel tasks, since
TimerTask exposes a
cancel() method. What I failed to realize was that you can do the exact same thing using
ScheduledExecutorService using the
ScheduledFuture object that is returned when one of the schedule methods is invoked. It's a bit more cumbersome to cancel tasks this way since you may have to keep references to both the task object and the future object, but it wouldn't be too difficult to create a custom class to manage this.
