Your problem is that you misunderstand the purpose of the servlet. It's intented to act on HTTP requests, nothing more. You want just a background task which runs once on daily basis.
EJB available? Use @Schedule
If your environment happen to support EJB (i.e. a real Java EE server such as WildFly, JBoss, TomEE, Payara, GlassFish, etc), then use @Schedule instead. Here are some examples:
@Singleton
public class BackgroundJobManager {
@Schedule(hour="0", minute="0", second="0", persistent=false)
public void someDailyJob() {
// Do your job here which should run every start of day.
}
@Schedule(hour="*/1", minute="0", second="0", persistent=false)
public void someHourlyJob() {
// Do your job here which should run every hour of day.
}
@Schedule(hour="*", minute="*/15", second="0", persistent=false)
public void someQuarterlyJob() {
// Do your job here which should run every 15 minute of hour.
}
@Schedule(hour="*", minute="*", second="*/5", persistent=false)
public void someFiveSecondelyJob() {
// Do your job here which should run every 5 seconds.
}
}
Yes, that's really all. The container will automatically pickup and manage it.
EJB unavailable? Use ScheduledExecutorService
If your environment doesn't support EJB (i.e. you're not using not a real Java EE server, but a barebones servletcontainer such as Tomcat, Jetty, etc), then use ScheduledExecutorService. This can be initiated by a ServletContextListener. Here's a kickoff example:
In a production system that may have multiple non-jee containers running. Use anot enterprise scheduler like Quartz scheduler which can be configured to use a database for task maamgememt.
Implement two classes and call startTask() in main.
public void startTask()
{
// Create a Runnable
Runnable task = new Runnable() {
public void run() {
while (true) {
runTask();
}
}
};
// Run the task in a background thread
Thread backgroundThread = new Thread(task);
// Terminate the running thread if the application exits
backgroundThread.setDaemon(true);
// Start the thread
backgroundThread.start();
}
public void runTask()
{
try {
// do something...
Thread.sleep(1000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}