Orange & Bronze Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Butch Landingin created a new application for Spring Batch to provide an easy and convenient way to manage and monitor Spring Batch jobs. The application, called the Batch Manager Console, is a Grails-based web administration console that displays executing and completed batch jobs.

"The main feature of the Batch Manager Console is that it provides a viewer where the current status of the batch jobs can be found. This makes it easier for both the developer team as well as end users to note how much of the work has been done already and automates handling batch jobs more conveniently." Butch explained.

Although Spring Batch is easy to use for batch-processing, it did not provide a way to show the statuses of batch jobs as well as exit codes. Butch solved the dilemma of using Spring Batch by creating a monitoring web console using Grails. Apart from this, the idea to create the Batch Manager Console also came to be since Orange & Bronze is currently using Springbatch for its Java-based Unit Link Insurance Administration (JULIA) system--an ongoing client project. According to Butch, he chose Grails to develop the viewer because it is user-friendly and highly-productive.

"The console also uses the Spring libraries and Spring Batch's own API to retrieve batch monitoring data and will make it easy to keep the application in sync whenever the Spring Batch version is upgraded" Butch added.

The Batch Manager Console simultaneously runs in the background while the batch process happens. It was designed with the end-users in mind especially those who need to make numerous transactions at one go, following a particular schedule. The console is now available for download through http://www.code.google.com/p/batman-con/ and licensed using GPLV3. It can be used either as a drop-in stand-alone web application, or it can be extended as part of a larger application.