You might already know about Jobby, the generic forking process manager written in Ruby which is designed to make handling the offloading of long running, complicated tasks as straightforward and resilient as possible. If you aren’t familiar with it, please check out Mark’s wonderful introductory article over on his blog.
The Rails interface to Jobby, Jobby Rails, has now been extracted from our work at PCCL and is ready for careful consumption. You can see more about it on it’s project page. It’s under heavy development and I would like to encourage anyone to fork away and get hacking on it, report issues and generally get stuck in and enjoy!