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By Dave Kapp

While Ruby is a terrific language, it doesn't offer a lot of ways to deal with asynchronous tasks using the default libraries. Thankfully, the community has come up with several great options for bringing asynchronicity to your applications. Resque is one of the forerunners of this, and it offers a lot of functionality and flexibility with an easily approachable API. Here, we'll go over several techniques for utilizing asynchronous workers to benefit your projects.

We'll start off with a review of how asynchronous processing works, and then we'll delve into three different things you can use Resque for: speeding up your applications by processing slow operations on the side, performing sequential updates with pipelining, and performing periodic maintenance tasks. We'll go over example code for how to handle these different situations and ideas for how to integrate them with existing applications.

While the examples will be given using Resque, the ideas and patterns discussed will be applicable to other worker queues, such as delayed_job and Sidekiq.

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In the video titled "Asynchronous Workers to the Resque" by Dave Kapp, the speaker discusses how to effectively utilize asynchronous workers in Ruby applications, particularly with the Resque library. Asynchronous processing is crucial for enhancing application responsiveness, especially when dealing with slow operations. Kapp outlines several key techniques for implementing asynchronous workers:

- **Isolating Slow Activities:** Asynchronous workers can move slow tasks out of the request/response cycle, ensuring user operations are not hindered by delays caused by slow API calls or computations. For instance, freeing the main application to process other requests while an API call is being made improves overall user experience.

- **Pipelining Processing:** Pipelining involves breaking larger tasks into smaller, manageable jobs that can be executed sequentially. This not only clarifies job structure, improving maintainability, but also enhances debugging efficacy. Kapp recommends that each worker perform a specific task, ensuring separation of concerns and reducing complexity.

- **Periodic Maintenance Tasks:** Resque and similar libraries can automate routine background jobs like data collection and reporting. Kapp suggests using rake tasks to enqueue these periodic jobs, emphasizing that this can help in maintaining data integrity and application performance.

Throughout the talk, Kapp emphasizes two best practices—"shared nothing" architecture to minimize concurrency issues and ensuring jobs are idempotent, meaning repeat executions do not lead to unintended state changes.

The concluding points highlight the importance of managing concurrency wisely, stressing that while it offers many advantages, it requires careful consideration to avoid complications such as race conditions. Kapp leaves the audience with critical rules for handling concurrency and offers resources for further exploration. Overall, the discussion provides valuable insights into using asynchronous workers effectively within Ruby applications, with practical advice and examples relevant to developers in various contexts.

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