Active Job is a framework for declaring jobs and making them run on a variety of queueing backends. These jobs can be everything from regularly scheduled clean-ups, billing charges, or mailings. Anything that can be chopped up into small units of work and run in parallel, really.

It also serves as the backend for ActionMailer’s #deliver_later functionality that makes it easy to turn any mailing into a job for running later. That’s one of the most common jobs in a modern web application: Sending emails outside of the request-response cycle, so the user doesn’t have to wait on it.

Active Job is currently being developed in a separate repository until it’s ready to be merged in with Rails. The current plan is to have Active Job be part of the Rails 4.2 release, but plans may change depending on when this framework stabilizes and feels ready.

The latest version of Active Job can be installed with RubyGems:

% [sudo] gem install activejob

Source code can be downloaded as part of the Rails project on GitHub

• github.com/rails/activejob

Active Job is released under the MIT license:

• www.opensource.org/licenses/MIT