In this new post to his blog Adam Jensen looks at creating cron jobs with the help of the Zend Framework without having to load up the entire MVC architecture to get there.

So, we're going to need a new application bootstrap and entry point, one that eschews the MVC routing and dispatch process in favor of something simpler. Essentially, all we'll need is to be able to run an arbitrary collection of cron "task plugins," the list of which can be configured in plain text via any of the various Zend_Config formats (e.g., the default application.ini file).

He starts with the base functionality, a task plugin interface that allows you to set up a "framework" to run the tasks in. He also creates a simple cron service that handles the execution of the tasks (this is the main executable) and includes the code for creating the bootstrap for the Zend Framework to understand how to use it all. Then to create a new task, all you have to do is extend the CronInterface.