Hotwire Series: Hotwire and ActiveJob: Coordinating Background Jobs with UI Updates - Part 7

  • Date5/7/2025
  • Reading Time7 min
Hotwire Series: Hotwire and ActiveJob: Coordinating Background Jobs with UI Updates - Part 7

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

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