[Ruby] Tracking messages & progress

[Ofer Matan]

I am using rails to provide a web interface to deploying some test sandboxes
on a windows machine. 

The application does a chain of admins tasks:  My first cut at this was just
piping all output to StringIO and then when the task completes displaying
it.

This is not very pleasing as the browser hangs for a while with no feedback.
What I'd like is to stream the messages as they come while still keeping the
browser locked. 

What would be the best approach to this:

 

.         Spawning the task and doing a periodic_remote_call to monitor the
log (though not sure how to lock the browser in this case)

.         Action chunking: Chunk the big process into smaller ones that each
updates the page with the message and then calls the next one in the chain -
seems like lots of work and brittle.

 

-Ofer