> An other option is to use different open source technologies such as
> JBoss Seam until Java EE 6. I haven't looked much into the equivalent
> of an EJB timer that is cluster aware and does cron-like scheduling.
I'm not certain if it will fulfill your specific requirements, but we
use Quartz very successfully in our J2EE apps for cron-like
scheduling, and it is absolutely cluster-aware and supports JTA.
Wayne