Ruby on Rails

1. You render your card info entry screen in the browser, but have the submit button go STRAIGHT to Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.net, etc.
2. When the user submits, the browser sends the PCI data to the payment processor directly.
3. They grab the payment info and do whatever needs doing... then
4. The Payment processor then REDIRECTS the client back to your server with some context so you can match up the client, payment, etc.  
   
5. You get the request from the client and do whatever you need to tell them if it worked or not.

Have a few cases where it is critically important to flush the output of 'render' immediately.  For example:


 def place_order
  if validate_and_record_order?
   render :text => "OK"
  else
   render :text => "ERROR"
  end
  # DESPERATELY WANT TO FLUSH OUTPUT HERE!
  # Do lots of talking with banks, send out mailers, etc.
 end


Another wrinkle here is we can't store the customer's banking information to run as a deferred task.  Ideally we just want to say 'flush the output' after the 'if' block.  Even if there's an exception after the 'if' we still don't want them to get a 500, we want them to get the OK/ERROR.

The problem we have is the people connecting to our app are sometimes timing out (they have a short timeout) and think the order failed when in fact it was recorded, customer was charged, etc.  I'm a little hesitant about using Thread.new, but perhaps that's the only reasonable way to flush the output early?

btw- This is Rails 4.0.x, Apache+Passenger.

Thanks!


Phil