OVERVIEW

Project	IProcess
Homepage	https://github.com/robgleeson/IProcess
Documentation	http://rubydoc.info/gems/iprocess/frames
Author	Rob Gleeson

DESCRIPTION

Provides a number of abstractions on top of spawning subprocesses and interprocess communication. It has a simple and easy to use API that supports synchronous and asynchronous method calls plus one or two other useful features shown in the examples below.

EXAMPLES

The first two examples(one & two) are using the synchronous APIs, a little below those(3) demos the asynchronous API.

1.

Three subprocesses are spawned. The return value of the block, even though executed in a subprocess, is returned to the parent process as long as it may be serialized by Marshal(or the serializer of your choice, this is configurable):

messages = IProcess.spawn(3) { {msg: "hello"} }
p messages # => [{msg: "hello"}, {msg: "hello"}, {msg: "hello"}]

2.

You can spawn a subprocess with a block or with any object that responds to #call. If you had a worker that was too complicated as a block you could try this:

class Worker
  def initialize
    @num = 1
  end

  def call
    @num + 1
  end
end
IProcess.spawn(5, Worker.new) # => [2, 2, 2, 2, 2]

3.

A subprocess is spawned asynchronously.

class Inbox
  def initialize
    @messages = []
  end

  def recv(msg)
    @messages << msg
  end
end
inbox = Inbox.new
jobs = IProcess.spawn! { Process.pid }
jobs.map { |job| job.report_to(inbox) }

SERIALIZERS

A serializer is any object that implements load & dump. You can choose what serializer you'd like to use through the IProcess.serializer= method:

IProcess.serializer = JSON

I know JSON & Marshal(the default) are supported out of the box because they implement both of those methods. MessagePack does not however but you could easily write a wrapper:

require 'msgpack'
obj = Class.new do
  def self.dump(obj)
    MessagePack.pack(obj)
  end

  def self.load(obj)
    MessagePack.unpack(obj)
  end
end
IProcess.serializer = obj

PLATFORM SUPPORT

supported

• Rubinius (1.9 mode)
• CRuby (1.9)

unsupported

• CRuby 1.8
• MacRuby
• JRuby

LICENSE

MIT. See LICENSE.txt.

INSTALL

$ gem install iprocess