Backgroundrb devel - Sep 2008 - async_some_task vs new_worker & deleting a unique worker

Hi All,

I am using custom data collection agents to periodically poll a given  
data source on the internet, for a given user of our application. I  
would like to create a backgroundrb worker, per type of data source,  
per user, to kick off the associated data collection agent in it''s own
background process.

I have looked at the docs and I am wondering if using  
MiddleMan.new_worker would suffice. I could have the worker''s
"create"
method kick off the data collection agent. Is there some additional  
benefit to moving the agent creation logic to the "async_some_task"  
worker functionality instead? I would like each worker and associated  
agent to run in their own process / thread to unload the burden from  
the Rails application.

On a related note, I also need to kill the data collection agent when  
the user is no longer interested in collecting data from a particular  
source. I plan to create the worker with a unique worker_key. Will  
using that worker_key along with the worker name / type in the delete  
method only kill the worker of that name associated with the given  
key? I need workers of the same type with different keys to keep  
processing. By killing the worker, will the data collection agent  
created by that worker also be destroyed?

I hope my questions are clear enough. I greatly appreciate any help.

--Mike