Maintaining interoperability between plugins (gems etc) is a perpetual headache.

In some ways, I'm surprised this hasn't been there all along..

On the other hand I'm a little surprised something this simple is being celebrated as a big deal.

It's nice to see rails continue to evolve, time will tell how much it ends up looking compared to the over-arching frameworks it was out to under-do.

...why? This isn't supposed to be the one true rails queueing implementation, just a standard interface to code against. Without it third party libraries have to resort to all sorts of ugly workarounds to push work into the background ... or just not provide that feature. With this in place third party tools can push into the queue without knowing or caring what specific kind of queue you're using.