Fake cron?

[eluser]Derek Allard[/eluser]
I've not thought about this in too much detail, but I like the idea in principal, especially for applications that you distribute, as you can never be sure of the environment they'll get set up in.

In order to not delay the loading of the page you're using, I would think an ajax request to a cron controller, triggered onload would be best. Its true that this wouldn't get called for visitors with js disabled, but since we're checking it every page load anyhow, that shouldn't be a problem.

It would be easy enough to have a table called "cron_jobs" or something, with timestamps dictating if something should be run.