Announcing DJJob, a PHP port of delayed_job (opens in new tab)

Also the php PECL gearman driver (http://pecl.php.net/package/gearman) works well with the C-based gearmand server (http://gearman.org/). We do some asynchronous image processing with PHP gearman workers, and it's been a very stable solution for us.

In your example, does the call:

$worker = new DJWorker($options); $worker->start();

Actually: 1. block until all jobs stored in the database have been completed 2. simply run a single job and return 3. return immediately and run all the jobs on a separate thread in the background

I'm wondering where in a web application would be the best place to call $worker->start()?

I'm the author of Delayed Job. The popularity of it really surprises me to no end, and always brings a smile to my face. DJ took about 15 minutes to code up originally and is a product of one of those software rage moments ("why don't people queue like this??!").

I put it on GitHub because Jeremy Kemper really wanted to have a look at it. I thought the idea behind it was so naive that it would have occurred to everyone who ever needed a queue and had discarded the approach for some reason.

Little did I know that it was a fairly novel approach and that it would become one of my most popular libraries, right after ActiveMerchant and Liquid.

Thank you for the PHP port!

you need to strip out the implementation specific classes such as propel and the mysql-specific calls to make this useful to anybody else

for eg. an in-memory sqlite db would be ideal for this purpose (and a lot faster)

If you like Resque, too:

http://github.com/chrisboulton/php-resque

Made something very similar to this in PHP about a year ago. It's buried in the Drupal project called Boost. It's the multi process crawler. It supports up to 8 processes crawling your site getting the cache warm. Gets call on cron & then 15 seconds after drupal's cron finished it starts up all 8 "threads". I've used it for image processing as well. Very stable will run for days if you give it a big enough queue (millions of pages to crawl). http://drupal.org/project/boost