Ruby on Rails: How to run things in the background?

Question

When a new resource is created and it needs to do some lengthy processing before the resource is ready, how do I send that processing away into the

Answer 1

What about:

def background_check
   exec("script/runner check_for_record_in_www.rb #{self.username}") if fork == nil
end

The program "check_for_record_in_www.rb" will then run in another process and will have access to ActiveRecord, being able to access the database.