Let’s face it, we all want a better_bj. Well, I’m the guy who will give it to you.

The original, less satisfying bj was a background job manager for Rails by ara.t.howard. Surprised? What did you think it stood for? Shame on you!

You used bj as a super simple, zero administration, background priority queue for Rails and better_bj strives to preserve that goal. However, better_bj will drop Windows support in favor of a more flexible forked process design intended to work on Unix.

Upgrades in better_bj:

• Load the full Rails environment for the runner and job processes

• Support different types of jobs: shell command, Rake task, and evaled code

• Support for periodic jobs

• Improve the command-line interface

• More stats and reporting for jobs and workers