Requiring gem in Rails 3 Controller failing with "Constant Missing"

Question

I've seen this asked a few times in other threads, but none of the answers seem to apply.

Environment: Rails 3 amazon/ecs gem from jugend. The lone file is here: http://github.com/jugend/amazon-ecs/blob/master/lib/amazon/ecs.rb

my gemfile has: gem 'amazon-ecs', :git => 'git://github.com/jugend/amazon-ecs.git'

Everything works in irb. I can run: bundle console require 'amazon/ecs' and then go to town

when I try to use it from the controller though, like so: require 'amazon/ecs'

require 'amazon/ecs'

class SearchController < ApplicationController
  def index    
  end

  def results
    Amazon::Ecs.configure do |options|
        options[:aWS_access_key_id] = '[key]'
        options[:aWS_secret_key] = '[secret]'
    end

    res = Amazon::Ecs.item_search(params[:search], {:response_group => 'Medium', :search_index => 'All'})
  end
end

I get: uninitialized constant SearchController::Amazon at line 8, where I first try to use Amazon.

the ecs.rb has a module Amazon containing a class Ecs. I'm not sure why this is working in erb, and not in rails.

I'm still kinda new to Rails, so please answer using small words. :-/

Answer 1

Was given the answer. I moved my initialization code to an initializer in config/initializers file, removed the require entirely, and things worked. I don't know why though, so if someone could answer that, that'd be great.