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Compared to the Competition
Most available Java Job Schedulers are based on the Unix Kron application. There are not many free, open source schedulers available in the market to compete against Quartz. While there are commercial products that provide similar or better features than Quartz, most of these are either Kron replications or satisfy other business needs in addition to job scheduling.
Java Timer
Why can't you just use the Java Timer to do the same things that Quartz does? Firstly, Quartz abstracts the scheduling process from the regular application code by providing a self-contained API. Secondly, Quartz provides events and callback mechanisms to monitor the scheduled tasks and take alternative actions accordingly. Thirdly, Quartz allows you to group and manage jobs according to their roles. Apart from that, Quartz provides additional flexibility through plug-ins and third-party components.
Flux Job Scheduler
Flux has a built-in scheduler. It's a J2EE-based API and has almost all the same features as Quartz. Flux is also able to handle complex business logics used for scheduling, Quartz isn't. Flux also provides a user interface to manage and schedule jobs. However, Flux is also a workflow and business process management engine. So, for users who just need a scheduling facility, Flux would be overkill. Moreover, Flux comes is a commercial product and comes with a price.
Simplicity and Ease-of-integration
Again, one can always argue that most of tasks done by Quartz can be programmed using the built-in Java Timer API. But why would you want to take the trouble of creating an API from scratch when an open source API like Quartz can do it? Quartz's biggest advantage is its simplicity and ease-of-integration: you can plug Quartz API into any existing application binary without any additional programming and will behave just like any user-defined API. Moreover, the additional features like transaction support and callback events would be more difficult to program in a custom API than in Quartz. Compared to the alternatives in the market today, Quartz provides a simple, unobtrusive, and comprehensive package for scheduling applications.
Quartz could stand to add some more additional features— things like factory classes for messaging, Mail, and FTP. These features could be very useful as most scheduling applications do use the above features. Though Quartz allows you to integrate with any of the above applications, having factory classes to directly integrate with these APIs would be helpful. Another nice feature to have would be a user-interface. This would help non-Java programmers, like system administrators, to configure and use Quartz without actually programming. We can hope that future versions of Quartz might provide these features.
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