rails/rails — pull request #9924 by jacobo (2013-03-25 18:03:45+00:00)
Title: serializable_hash: Jobs should partially define how to as serialize and de-serialize themselves

Problem I'm trying to solve:

Users of Rails Q API expect the Q system to be able to serialize and de-serialize the jobs they enQ. If it's unable to do so, it should complain about it with an exact reason, at the time of enQ.

My take:

This problem can't easily be solved exclusively by the framework. Any attempt to do so fully would likely lead to a leaky abstraction wherein Job authors end up digging in to the guts of such an implementation.

Instead, a simple and minimal contract should exist between Job objects and the framework responsible for enQ-ing and running them.

1. a run method
2. a serializable_hash method
3. a from_serializable_hash method

Additionally:

Backend job systems should have a choice on how to serialize jobs. It's fine for Marshal to be the default in Rails, but it's unnecessarily restricting to impose this requirement on all integrators.