Continuing the Spring 3.0 "simplification series" started by Keith and Chris , I would like to provide a quick overview of simplifications in scheduling and task execution enabled by Spring 3.0. I will be walking through a basic sample application that you can checkout from the spring-samples Subversion repository. It has been designed to be as simple as possible while showcasing both annotation-driven and XML-based approaches to scheduling tasks in Spring 3.0. Let's begin with the annotation-driven approach. You can run it directly via the main() method in AnnotationDemo. If you take a look, you'll see that it's nothing more than a bootstrap for a Spring ApplicationContext: public static void main(String[] args) { new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext( "config.xml" , AnnotationDemo. class ); } The reason nothing else is necessary is that the ApplicationContext contains an "active" component, which we will...