[Mongrel] Offloading Background Tasks

[hemant]

On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 7:10 AM, Nathan Esquenazi <lists at ruby-forum.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
>  I am very interested in off-loading tasks from the request/response
>  cycle in order to speed up my application. My application is heavily
>  connected to using web services both external and from other servers we
>  host.
>
>  My application does the following long-running tasks:
>
>  - accesses / pushes to the twitter api's (with possible need for status
>  responses)
>  - accesses / pushes the facebook api's  (with need for status responses)
>  - requesting data from another server we run (rails needs access data)
>  - pushes information to aim using ruburple
>
>  I am just curious and grateful for any help people can give for what
>  would suit me best. I am familar with backgroundrb and bj along with
>  starling, etc. I don't know which one will suit me best based on the
>  tasks I need to queue.
>
>  My main concern is how to properly request data and then show it to the
>  user. For instance, when the user logs into the rails application, I
>  need to show them certain information about them which comes from
>  complex analyzing of data done by another server we run.
>
>  When a user logs in, I need to show them the current results of this
>  analysis. To do this, I need to perform a GET request to another server
>  and get the results and then show them to the user. What is the "best
>  practice" way to achieve this in which I can offload this task to a
>  background worker and then get the results and display them to the user.
>
>  For instance, say the user logs in and then the background worker kicks
>  off to retrieve their current analyzed data from the server. How do I
>  then wait for the data to be retrieved by the worker and when it's ready
>  display it to the user?
>
>  I feel like I am missing something because I don't see how the worker
>  can "tell" the main rails application that it now has the data and then
>  somehow show it when its "ready". Do I need to constantly poll the
>  server or how is this usually done.
>
>  Also, I need to allow the user to make certain changes to data fields
>  and then I need to push those changes to twitter and facebook via a
>  background process.
>
>  What solution is best suited based on what I described and could someone
>  please help me understand the pattern for how to do this. I will be
>  eternally grateful.
>  --

For what you are describing, I think BackgrounDRb will be best fit.
Since, its the only solution ( that I know of ) provides interfacing
with rails so as you can actually fetch results retrieved by a worker
in rails.

Bj is a worker queue to offload tasks. AFAIK, you can't really
interact seamlessly from rails. I don't know much about startling. But
this is coming from guy who maintains bdrb to take it with a grain of
salt.