TaskForest Design Philosophy

The TaskForest Job Scheduler is designed with the philosophy that a program should be no more complicated than the minimum amount required to achieve its objectives. Complicated functions can be achieved by a conjunction of simpler functions.

To illustrate this, TaskForest has been designed to run as a single command that, once invoked from the command line, launches any jobs that need to be run, and then sleeps for a bit and then tries again. If you want, the taskforest script can also exit and be run repeatedly. It is a stateless application. You could launch taskforest once a day, and have it run all day, or you could run it once every minute (for example) using cron.

Since TaskForest does not need any graphical interface, it can be run on headless servers that don't have X installed. If you would prefer a graphical interface, it also comes with its own web server so that you can administer the application using any standard web browser. We also provide you a RESTful API that allow you to write your own web clients, so that you can control TaskForest from within your program. Everything you need to do to configure the system can be done by editing text files. More on that in the next section.