I want a persistent job scheduler. If I were to write my own job scheduler, it would probably be a restful service with one method:
POST /path/to/service HTTP/1.1 Host: myservice.com Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
url=someurl&millis=1000
And the service would hit the given url (method GET) after at least 1000 milliseconds have passed. It will keep hitting the url (possibly with exponential back-off) until the remote server returns 200.
I think this would be a very simple and universally useful way to handle background jobs and stuff like "e-mail me on such and such a date". (The specified url would contain the information about the e-mail message and recipient.)
It's so simple, that I can't be the first to have thought of it.
What (zero-configuration) job schedulers would you recommend I look into?