Eventmachine talk - Apr 2008 - Adding regular updates for long server calls

All,

I''m working on my first EM application, and I''m stuck. My
client calls
the server, which executes a long-running operation. I would like the
server to be able to send data back to the client as the job executes,
but right now all the data send to send_data is buffered up and sent
when the job is complete. I''ve Googled for solutions and have seen an
answer using EM.next_tick, but this did not work for me. Also, I
noticed in the document SPAWNED_PROCESSES it mentioned that spawned
processes can be used to solve this problem, but I have not yet found
an example. Here is a simplified version of my code

====== server ======require ''eventmachine''

class ExampleServer < EventMachine::Connection

  def receive_data(data)
    do_job
  end

  def do_job
    (1..10).each do |i|
      send_data "."                     # I want this data to be sent
back to the client before each call to long_operation
      long_operation
    end
    send_done
  end

  def long_operation
    # something that takes awhile
  end

  def send_done
    send_data "done"
  end

end

EventMachine::run {
  EventMachine::start_server "192.168.1.101", 7777, ExampleServer
}
====== client =====require ''eventmachine''

class ExampleClient < EventMachine::Connection

  def receive_data(data)
    puts data
  end

end

EventMachine::run {
  EventMachine::connect "192.168.1.101", 7777, ExampleClient do |c|
    c.send_data "go"
  end
}
==============
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Ben