Can a Rails app launch a rack app?

Question

If I have a Ruby on Rails application running on my Apache shared server (with Mongrel), can I get it to launch/run another total separate Rack application?

Then could I possibly build a Rails app that manages other rails/rack apps? So it could tell what apps are running and start/stop them when I want. Or is each app trapped in it's own "sandbox"?

Answer 1

In Rails 3 you can setup the router to pass any Rack application to the matched route. See: Action Dispatch.

Answer 2

Well, you can certainly develop a rails app that talks to a daemon that is running on the server as root and then interacts with other apps. Not sure that you'd be able to do everything directly from Rails...