I need advice on a decision that I have to make to decide whether I
should do background task in Rails or in Tomcat.
What I need to do is that a user of web app will create nnumber of text
messages which need to be sent to around 10,000+ users. Sms msg is
passed by the Ruby application to a http server running under Tomcat to
a java application that further passes the msg to sms gateway to be
deliverd to user.
I am planning to put msgs to be sent in a table in mysql by the ruby
application. Now I am not sure which is the reliable and better way to
send the msgs in the background - a background task in ruby or a
backgorund task in java. Also which is the best way to schedule and
start a background job in ruby/rails to handle such a large number of
records to be handled?
I dont think your challenge is where to run the background task as much
as
it is how to handle sending of large number of messages between systems.
I
would recommend you look at leveraging a messaging broker like ActiveMQ
that
will allow you to send messages asynchronously to a message queue that
can
then be picked up for processing by your java application with some JMS
client code.
have a look here for some example code on writing a JMS client in JRuby
that
would allow you to put messages onto the queue