Recently I was working on a project adding new functionality that would queue a long-running task to a background job. The original code looked something like this:

I’m really excited about the upcoming Great Lakes Ruby Bash in Ann Arbor on October 11th.  The distinguished Rubyists of the Grand Rapids Ruby Users Group are joining forces with us (Ann Arbor Ruby group) to put the conference together.  After attending eRubyCon in Columbus last weekend, I have to say the local conferences are much more engaging than the mega-conferences like RailsConf.  It’s great being able to get a chance to talk to everyone.  Hope to see you there!

Today I gleefully updated BackgrounDRb to 1.0.4 after I learned that a new release was out that supported clustered BDRb servers.  I quickly learned that regiester_status has been removed.  That’s right.  All that code that sends data from your workers to your app need to be refactored to put data into cache[job_key].  This approach is more thread-safe, however.  Perhaps you could even write your own wrapper that puts data into cache on a call to register_status.

Continuing the meme:

When Steve Jobs first announced “push email” for the upcoming iPhone 2.0 software, I was skeptical.  The two protocols I knew of, POP3 and IMAP, operate on a protocol that is always initiated by the client.  The user has to continuously check in with the server to see if new messages have arrived.  With POP3 and IMAP, you can approximate push email by polling server several times a minute.  I figured that Exchange supported some sort of persistent connection that allowed push, but from the way it was presented at Steve’s keynote, it seemed that they were touting push email for any mail account accessed by an iPhone.  I wrote off “push email” as a marketing ploy.  Im my mind, the mail server would have to know where the client was at all times to “push” updates.

Well, no sooner than I had written the previous article, did I consider NetBeans.  At this point I was willing to try anything, so I downloaded the special Ruby distribution and gave it a whirl.  One of the prereqs was the Java 1.6 runtime, a hefty download.  As NetBeans opened for the first time, I was greeted with a splash screen with a progress bar inching along as various Java libraries were loaded.  This did not bode well!  My bloat-meter was starting to register.