Request Tracker on Rails?

Question

I'm building an app which is going to have to handle and store a large amount of email (around 2-4 thousand a day) which will need to be seen and dealt with in various ways by a lot of people worldwide. Sounds like a ticketing system, right? With one twist -- I have a separate app which handles a lot of the processing for people who will be dealing with these emails, and it will need to pull out a lot of specialized information related to them. For example, a particular customer's information will be in the processing app (contact info, etc.) and when someone is looking at that information they'll also need to know if there are any open tickets for them, if and how they've responded to specific emails we've sent, etc.

I've had great experiences with RT (Request Tracker) as a ticketing system and believe it could handle the amount of email and categorize it in the way we need. However, my processing program is in Ruby on Rails. I've done a little work with Perl (which RT is written in) but not much, and I've never tried to have Ruby talk to Perl before. I know RT has an API and I'm slogging through it, but I wondered if there was already a good solution out there? I just need to pull data from RT into my Rails app, no writing required.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree? Should I try a different ticketing system that already works well with Rails? Should I just go ahead and pull the data directly from the DB since I'm only reading it? Just looking for some input, if this is anything that's been tried before. Thanks.

Answer 1

RT's web API is balls -- we use it at work to interface to our own stuff (Python webapps, mostly). I wouldn't recommend using it unless you're really keen on pain and suffering.

Going straight to the database, whilst still a bit painful, is by far the lesser evil. There's no docs on the structure as far as I can find, and it'll probably change on you between versions, but at least a DB schema is something that you've likely dealt with before and hence have some experience with. AR probably won't talk to it, as IIRC there's composite primary keys (or is support for those now in AR? I can't remember), but the native DB adapters aren't insane to deal with.