Daemons

Hi all

I’m new to RoR. I have one project almost completed and it’s gone pretty
smooth o far.

I’m planing my second project. It’s a hosted radio station automation
solution (similar to Live365’s basic broadcasting package).

People upload tracks to their respective stations. Through a web UI they
can set the track selection criteria and organize tracks. In the
background a DJ process runs, one for each station, and it selects
tracks according to the set criteria and sources them to an icecast
server.

I a simplistic version of this working with ASP.NET and a Windows
Service. Users organize tracks with the ASP.NET application, and the
tracks get selected and streamed via the Windows Service. Both
applications use the same business object layer (aka Models in the RoR
world).

So now I want to get this going in RoR but I’m unsure what to do about
the DJ process. I’d like to bury all the logic in the models, but I’m
not sure how the DJ process will use those models without running within
the context of rails. I know about the script/runner but thats only
intended to kick off jobs not background processes right?

What are my options?

I have only heard good things about backgroundrb

here are a list from the rails wiki:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToRunBackgroundJobsInRails/

I have worked with RailsCron, which I found quite difficult.