Asynchronous Tasks HowTo

[Stratos Pavlakis]

Hi all,

I am developing a JRuby app on Trinidad and I would like to handle some "expensive" requests, in an asynchronous manner.

This could simply be a separate thread on the server writing to an object in shared memory (application scope)
and a simple long polling request on the client that would get fed by this shared object by another controller. No need for fancy stuff like socket.io or EM-websockets.

As my application lives on a servlet container how do you think I should implement that? Using one of the standard RAILS libraries providing
background/asynchronous jobs or taking advantage of the Servlet 3.0's async request API? If the latter one, is there any doc describing how to write
a servlet inside a JRuby app?

I am really looking forward to some guidance towards this. Thanks!

[kares]

 Hey Stratos, sorry for the delay ...

Unfortunately this is not yet supported by JRuby-Rack and requires some work to be done.
The reason behind not being able to use this is most likely somewhere around no standard-waoy of doing Rack async responses.
But I do think there's an urgent need for it due Rails 4.0 since the way streaming responses are currently implemented is not optimal for JRuby (and esp. servlet containers).

It will take a while but I try to do my best to get this working (eventually).
Since there's an issue open on JRuby-Rack you can track it here: https://github.com/jruby/jruby-rack/issues/119

K.