The MOle, so named because it acts as the investigators agent, is a plugin that provides insight into the inner workings of Ruby on Rails in realtime, as requests come in and get processed. The author describes how the plugin came about and gives InfoQ readers a detailed introduction to his innovative plugin.
As the problem domain of your Rails applications expands, you may need to run computationally intensive or long running background tasks. How can you run these long background tasks without your web server timing out? And how do you display the progress to your users?