Is my PHP background task / Cron idea a good way to do this?

[johnsmith153]

I want to run certain tasks in the background and not on user request (e.g. send a transactional email and then based on the response do another action).

If I had a script which added this info to a database:

- PHP class
- PHP method
- parameters to pass to that method
- etc.

..and then every 5 minutes one Cron Task retrieved all the data from this database and executed those tasks (using class, method and params), is this secure?

It sounds a great idea to me. I could just store details of any class and method (and params) and have it run later.

If there was only one or two tasks then I suppose I could just write a specific script and execute as a Cron Task, but this gives me flexibility to run anything.

[trq]

Sounds feasible. I would personally prefer to use a queuing system of some sort, but whatever floats your boat.