I use BackgrounDRb in a couple of apps because it's easy and quick to set up. When I need to scale it up or route jobs to systems that may not be Ruby based, I

I use BackgrounDRb in a couple of apps because it's easy and quick to set up. When I need to scale it up or route jobs to systems that may not be Ruby based, I go with ActiveMessaging connected to ActiveMQ. ActiveMessaging supports a lot of broker types through StompConnect. The solution outlined in this article looks a bit simpler, though, so it probably worth tinkering with.