Ruby certainly has that ability, and there's nothing particular to Rails that prevents you from doing any Ruby things like that. In the Rails world, actually,

Ruby certainly has that ability, and there's nothing particular to Rails that prevents you from doing any Ruby things like that. In the Rails world, actually, you'll find lots of solutions (e.g. delayed_job) for offloading work like that from the web server process on to a dedicated worker queue. But there's no reason you can't just handle it synchronously either.