What's the best way to organize worker processes in Rails?

Question

I frequently have some code that should be run either on a schedule or as a background process with some parameters. The common element is that they are run outside the disp

Answer 1

I have a system that receives requests and then needs to call several external systems using web-services. Some of these requests take longer than a user can be expected to wait and I use an enterprise queuing system(activemq) to handle these requests.

I am using the ActiveMessaging plugin to do this. This allows me to marshall the request and place it on a queue for asynchronous processing with access to the request data, however you will need to write a polling service if you want to wait for the response.

I have seen Ryan Bates railscast on Starling and Workling and they look promising but I haven't used them.