Any other kinds of "Task Queue" APIs ?

Question

I'm curious if it's common practice outside of the GAE platform to be able to defer tasks to background workers via webhooks.

I find it particularly useful to speed up the front-end of webapps, by delegating any long process to background tasks.

I'd like to hear about open source software allowing to implement a TaskQueue-like API, with webhooks preferably, if anyone has some experience in this area.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I agree - it's a very useful pattern. It's not yet widespread, but is gaining in popularity as an easy way to defer work.

RabbitMQ is a task queue type service that you can use in any project. TyphoonAE uses it to implement the Task Queue API.

Amazon have the Simple Queue Service, and the new Simple Notification Service.

Ruby on Rails has delayed_job, which also served as the inspiration for the App Engine 'deferred' library.