I am redesigning a php app in RoR. I am brand new to both Ruby and
Rails. There is a front end to the app with the typical MVC kind of
interactions between end users and a database. There is also backend
processing that happens independent of any user interaction. My
question is, does the RoR framework make any sense for this backend
processing seeing as there wouldn’t really be any “views”? I don’t
want to code in two languages unnecessarily but I also don’t want to
force something into a mold for which it is not designed. Does RoR for
backend processing make sense? If not, what does?
Hi Kenneth,
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Kenneth V. [email protected]
wrote:
I am redesigning a php app in RoR. I am brand new to both Ruby and
Rails. There is a front end to the app with the typical MVC kind of
interactions between end users and a database. There is also backend
processing that happens independent of any user interaction. My
question is, does the RoR framework make any sense for this backend
processing seeing as there wouldn’t really be any “views”? I don’t
want to code in two languages unnecessarily but I also don’t want to
force something into a mold for which it is not designed. Does RoR for
backend processing make sense? If not, what does?
My short answer is yes. My current app provides two sorts of what I
think you mean when you say ‘backend processing.’ script/runner gives
us access to the Rails app outside the ‘interactive user’ model.
In the first case there a user requests a report. That request is
queued via the Background job plugin. When the Background job runs,
it
Oops. Continuing…
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 6:08 PM, Bill W. [email protected]
wrote:
force something into a mold for which it is not designed. Does RoR for
backend processing make sense? If not, what does?My short answer is yes. My current app provides two sorts of what I
think you mean when you say ‘backend processing.’ script/runner gives
us access to the Rails app outside the ‘interactive user’ model.
In the first case there a user requests a report. That request is
queued via the Background job plugin. When the Background job runs,
it creates the report and then emails it to the requester.
In the second case, we have cron jobs that also call script/runner to
do nightly database maintenance; removing accounts that have been
canceled, etc.
If you’ve got a specific case you’re wondering how you’d handle, feel
free to ask about it.
HTH,
Bill
On Mar 1, 6:15pm, Bill W. [email protected] wrote:
question is, does the RoR framework make any sense for this backend
queued via the Background job plugin. When the Background job runs,
it creates the report and then emails it to the requester.
There are several background processing gems available the two that
seem to be the most popular are Delayed Job(DJ) and Resque. My company
uses DJ and have been very pleased with how it works and have had just
a single problem with it but only because we allowed unvalidated input
to get passed to the worker (our failure, clearly). I would strongly
discourage use of Background Job because it is no longer being
actively developed (last updated ~2 years ago) and has problems w/
Rails 3 IIRC.
In the second case, we have cron jobs that also call script/runner to
do nightly database maintenance; removing accounts that have been
canceled, etc.
To ease your life writing your cron file I would recommend Whenever,
you write a schedule in ruby and when you run the generator supplied
w/ the gem it installs the schedule into the current user’s crontab,
we have this linked to our deploy process so when we deploy a new
crontab gets written ensuring it gets update.