When you’re building a big Web app, oftentimes you get to a point when you need to run some asynchronous batch process. You need to do something at, say, 2 a.m. that doesn’t involve a request from a browser.
I ran into this problem the other day, and I tossed around some of the more obvious ideas of how to handle it —
I do some hairy Outlook and Exchange programming. Not by choice, but by force -- I have users that won't give up Outlook for any reason, and they want it to interoperate with our PHP-based database. I usually do my Outlook scripting in VBScript, since Outlook has a snazzy COM…