Introduction#

• The challenge of long-running processes in web applications
• Traditional approaches to background processing feedback
• How Hotwire transforms the background job experience

Understanding the Job-UI Coordination Problem#

• User expectations for feedback during processing
• The disconnect between background jobs and web requests
• The polling anti-pattern and its limitations

Architecture Overview#

• Designing a job notification system
• Communication patterns between jobs and UI
• State management considerations

Setting Up ActiveJob with Hotwire#

• Configuring ActiveJob in Rails 8
• Setting up job processors (Sidekiq, Good Job, etc.)
• Creating the notification infrastructure

Implementation Patterns#

• Using Turbo Streams for job status updates
• Designing job status partials
• Creating a job monitoring dashboard

Real-Time Progress Updates#

• Calculating and broadcasting progress percentages
• Implementing progress bars with Turbo Streams
• Handling indeterminate progress scenarios

Error Handling and Recovery#

• Displaying job failures in the UI
• Retry mechanisms with user feedback
• Graceful degradation strategies

Advanced Job Coordination#

• Job dependencies and sequences
• Parallel job execution with aggregated updates
• Long-running job considerations

User Experience Enhancements#

• Background processing vs UI blocking operations
• Managing user expectations during processing
• Providing estimated completion times

Testing Background Job UI Updates#

• Unit testing job notifications
• Integration testing the full job cycle
• Simulating different job scenarios (success, failure, timeout)

Performance and Scaling Considerations#

• Managing broadcast frequency
• Scaling with many concurrent jobs
• Database impact of job status tracking

Conclusion#

• Best practices summary
• Additional resources
• Next steps for advanced implementations

Code Repository#

• Link to the example job coordination implementation
• Setup and configuration documentation