This document provides an overview of asynchronous and concurrent technologies in Ruby, including:
- Asynchronous execution of long background tasks using solutions like Delayed Job, Resque, and Beanstalkd.
- The reactor pattern and EventMachine library for asynchronous non-blocking I/O. EventMachine uses a single-threaded event loop.
- WebSockets and real-time applications. WebSockets provide a full-duplex communication channel with low overhead compared to polling.
- Publish/subscribe systems like Pusher for real-time messaging between clients. Pusher uses WebSockets with fallback and supports public, private, and presence channels.