I would like to know what my alternative would be for the following problem on a non-windows box that will be running a ruby on rails web application.
The scenario is this:
The user will activate a deep web crawl of a site that might take about 15 minutes to complete. I can use ajax to update the web page every so often with the results as they happen. I want to email the user the results when the job is finished.
The problem is that I want to move the job of writing the results to the database and emailing the user out of process so that the user can close the browser down and the job completes.
If I was doing this in windows, I would use msmq (message queuing) to send the job to a windows service that would complete the job.
How would I do this from ruby on rails and are there any gems that you would recommend?
I also might be migrating to JRuby so this might be a consideration also.
Message queuing is the answer for a web application, no matter the implementation language/framework. There are several good message queuing options for Rails. Delayed Job and Resque are two that seem to be popular these days.
In addition, there are Ruby clients for the STOMP and AMQP protocols, making it possible to use many of the popular message queues such as ApacheMQ and RabbitMQ.