Question

I am planning a system that requires collaboration between many local Rails apps. The design calls for a global app to relay RESTful requests between these servers.

For example, imagine each school having a local Rails app, including a Teacher resource. I propose a global app which provides access to teachers as: /school/42/teacher/3

The School resource on the global server has a field for the base URL of the app at each school, so it can relay such a request to school_42_url/teacher/3.

The design calls for relaying, rather than having school servers connecting directly to each other.

I can think of several ways to achieve this but, being new to Rails, can’t work out which one is ‘the Rails way’.

1. ActiveResource is appealing, but seems to require a fixed ‘site’ rather than setting it for each request.

2. Routing, perhaps with URL globbing might work, but I need to see an example of how to achieve this.

3. A third approach would be a custom Controller, but this doesn’t feel like the Rails way.

To be clear, the combination of {school_id, teacher_id} is globally unique, but the global server need not store details of teachers, those are treated as a web resource.

Comments or suggestions welcome.

Answer 1

You should use rails RESTful architecture on your client apps to expose apis (xml, json), and some library like Net::HTTP to call those apis from your server(main) app.