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StupidBackground
================

This is a very simple background scheduler for periodical tasks to be performed
in your rails application.

Take the name as the spirit behind this small piece of software! There is no
fancy threading action going on and you should not use this if your life in
any way to an exact timing of one of your jobs. 

The intervals you configure
are meant as "at least this time is BETWEEN two runs of the job".
So if you have a interval of 5 seconds and your tasks takes 30 seconds to run
it behaves this way:

Second 0: Your Task
...
Second 30: Your Task finishes
Second 30: Another run of your job

If your task takes only 2 seconds to run it would look like this:

Second 0: Your Task
...
Second 2: Your Task finishes
...
Second 5: Another run of your job
...

But there is a way to run more than one "runner" at the same time.
Maybe you have some very long running tasks and some very quick ones. Then
you can specify a runner with:

  use_runner :some_fancy_name

in your worker class and this worker will be decoupled from the other ones.
If you specify the same name at two worker classes these classes will run in
one worker. Easy, isn't it ;)

If you need a more versatile solution you should have look at BackgrounDRB and
if you only need background tasks that do not repeat check the 
backgroundFu Plugin.

Credits
=======
I'm using the Daemonize Library from Travis Whitton, which could be 
found at http://grub.ath.cx/daemonize/ .

This library is released under the LGPL.
Thanks a lot for this cute peace of software Travis!

Also kudos to the #ruby-de IRC channel on freenode.org, those guys are great and
very helpful!

Example
=======
Start the background server:
rake background:start

Stop the background server:
rake background:stop

Start the server with an alternative Jobs YAMl File
(The default Jobs YAML file is at config/background_jobs.yml)
rake background:start jobs_file=/tmp/some_jobs.yml

Status of your runners:
rake backgrund:status

Contact
=======
Contact Thorben, the creator of this little plugin: [email protected]


Copyright (c) 2007-2009  FEtMab - Die Browserspiele-Manufaktur, released under the BSD license