ajax - Best practice for Rails third party API calls?

Question

I have a rails app that calls a third party API for weather.

The problem is that the API call is generally very slow and sometimes fails. Showing the weather is not a necessity but it adds a nice bit of extra and pertinent information.

Right now I call the Wunderground API using Barometer gem in the controller which means the pages takes forever to load if the API is slow or fails.

I was hoping to move to this call to an AJAX call from the page once the page is loaded. I don't mind if the information shows but a bit delayed because as mentioned it is not hugely important.

I was just curious the best practices for making such a call? What is the Rails way?

Answer 1

The recommended way is to call to the API in the background (using a scheduler) and save the result in the database. Then in the controller you can get the data from the database and there won't be any delay.