I’m developing a website (using a LAMP stack) which must handle many user-made scheduling tasks. It works as following: an user creates an event and sets a date, and others users (as many as 63) may join. A few hours before the set date, the system must email each user subscribed to that event. And that’s it.
However, I have never handled scheduling, and the only tools I know (poorly) are cron and at. My plan is to create an at job for each event, which will call a script that gets all subscribers emails and mails them.
My question is: is my plan/design good? Is it scalable? Are there better options that I should be aware of?
If you would consider a proper framework that uses an application server (and not a simple webserver), Spring has a task scheduling layer that’s simple to use. Scheduling jobs on the server really requires more than what a simple LAMP install can do, but I haven’t used PHP in a while so maybe there’s an equivalent.
Here’s an article that compares some of your options.