AsyncRunner for Ruby/GLib

Was playing around a bit with a synchronous network library that I wanted to use from a GTK+ frontend. Obviously this wouldn’t work too well as the UI would be blocked while waiting for the library to return from it’s network calls. So I wanted to run the network operations in the background using a thread but still get the callbacks in the main thread to be able to update the UI from there.

I ended up writing a small class I called AsyncRunner which is a small proxy to call methods in a various thread and get the callback in the main thread. It’s using the GLib Mainloop so it would only be useful in the cases where you actually have one.

require 'thread-sync'
class MySyncClass
  def foo_method(arg)
  end

  def bar_method(arg1, arg2)
  end
end

sync = MySyncClass.new

# In order to get the methods of MySyncClass asynchronous it is wrapped in an AsyncRunner.
async = AsyncRunner.new(sync)

async.foo_method('test') do
  ui_update()
end

main_loop = GLib::MainLoop.new
main_loop.run