How to schedule an hourly job with Play Framework 2.1?

Question

In Play 1 it was simply:

@Every(value = "1h")
public class WebsiteStatusReporter extends Job {

    @Override
    public void doJob() throws Exception {
        // do something
    }
}

What is the equivalent for Play 2.1?

I know that Play uses akka and I found this code sample:

import play.api.libs.concurrent.Execution.Implicits._
Akka.system.scheduler.schedule(0.seconds, 30.minutes, testActor, "tick")

But being a Scala noob I don't understand how works. Can someone provide a complete, working example (end to end)?

Answer 1

Here is an extract from a code of mine:

import scala.concurrent.duration.DurationInt
import akka.actor.Props.apply
import play.api.Application
import play.api.GlobalSettings
import play.api.Logger
import play.api.Play
import play.api.libs.concurrent.Execution.Implicits.defaultContext
import play.api.libs.concurrent.Akka
import akka.actor.Props
import actor.ReminderActor

object Global extends GlobalSettings {

  override def onStart(app: Application) {

    val controllerPath = controllers.routes.Ping.ping.url
    play.api.Play.mode(app) match {
      case play.api.Mode.Test => // do not schedule anything for Test
      case _ => reminderDaemon(app)
    }

  }

  def reminderDaemon(app: Application) = {
    Logger.info("Scheduling the reminder daemon")
    val reminderActor = Akka.system(app).actorOf(Props(new ReminderActor()))
    Akka.system(app).scheduler.schedule(0 seconds, 5 minutes, reminderActor, "reminderDaemon")
  }

}

It simply starts a daemon at the start of the app, and then, every 5 minutes. It uses Play 2.1 and it works as expected.

Note that this code uses the Global object which allows to run some code on application startup.