Rails user queue system?

Question

I would like to create a Rails app that would allow users to control the serial port of the host server. To keep some order to the serial commands, I would like to have some sort of queue system that would only allow one user at a time to issue commands, with a time limit. When their time expires, the next user in the queue is given control.

Has anyone ever created anything similar? I am looking for any advice as to any pre-existing gems or plugins that can be modified to fit this need, or whether I should try and roll my own.

I will be using the ruby-serial library here to connect to an arduino. I would also like to authenticate users via Twitter/Facebook Oauth.

Answer 1

Async Observer is by far my favorite for asynchronous job queue execution.

If you built it with gearman you could synchronously manipulate such shared resources as well, even on a distributed system.