I have worked at a couple of places where I had a job system
connected to a web portal. The job system used a couple of daemons
that I wrote that connected to the database with active record and ran
various commands in parallel. I had a few Thread.new calls an so on.
At one time I had used backgroundrb to send email, but I forget
exactly why, but I started using DRb alot for various other complex
things and I liked the way I could communicate with the daemon over
DRb if I wanted to. If I look in the older Rails 3 book that covers
Rails 2.0, it mentions DRb as a viable background task solution.
I am starting to realize that Rails 3 has other stuff to look at,
like I guess resque ? I think that may require redis and I seem to
recall I had a problem trying to install redis on windows, so I am not
sure if I really need to struggle through the redis windows install to
get all that to work ?
Where I am right now is I have to present some code for an interview
tomorrow. I am not sure how well the people at that company are
familiar with Ruby, but I am also not sure if I should avoid
presenting any of this DRb daemon code. I am trying to rewrite an old
project I have in Rails 3 that does some web scraping, but I am not
sure I have enough time to present a daemon process with all that as
well, especially if I have to change it from DRb to something else.
A different company I had an interview with seemed to tell the
recruiting agency I was weak technically and I think it was because
they asked me about RVM and Resque which I was not familiar with. The
way they described RVM, I told them sounded like the way gemfiles in
Rails 3 handles the gems. The guys who interviewed me didn’t seem to
know alot about Ruby, except they knew that some other guys in a
different part of the company use RVM and Resque.
I had been buying all the new ruby books for awhile, but every time a
new version of something comes out, then I have to go buy a new book.
It seems easier to learn from books than all of the blogs, but I have
been trying to save money lately. I haven’t gotten the Rails way for
rails 3 yet.