Question

On a high Twitter app site. Where the app sends tweets via the users oauth credentials. Should the tweets be sent in the background, via a background worker (Resque, Delayed Job, etc)? Or should the web process handle it?

Answer 1

It really depends on your use case. Twitter itself I think sends an AJAX request to the API. You could do the same if it makes sense in your interface, but it does mean that you’re using a web process to do this. One of the benefits to this is that you can verify that the request was successful before returning a resopnse to the user. This is much easier than a scenario where you queue something in the background, it fails, and you want to alert the user (e.g. through a “real-time” ajax/socket-based message system or a flash notice on another request).

If you aren’t worried about showing the Tweets (e.g. your application is sending as part of a larger action), then doing it in the background is definitely the way to go.

Resque is great and jobs are really lightweight, so you could a quick integration to process these in the background pretty quickly.

# app/jobs/send_tweet.rb
class SendTweet
  @queue = :tweets

  def self.perform(user_id, content)
    user = User.find(user_id)
    # send Tweet
  end
end

# app/controllers/tweet_controller.rb
def create
  # assuming some things here, like validation and a `current_user` method
  Resque.enqueue(SendTweet, current_user.id, params[:tweet][:message])
  redirect_to :index
end