As the problem domain of your Rails applications expands, you may need to run computationally intensive or long running background tasks. How can you run these long background tasks without your web server timing out? And how do you display the progress to your users?
Shun'ichi Shinohara and Kiwamu Kato have been working on bringing reliable messging to Ruby with their own API & protocol project, based on previous experiences designing a Java-based high volume messaging framework. AP4R, Asynchronous Processing for Ruby, is an implementation of reliable asynchronous message processing, providing message queuing and message dispatching.
