How to consolidate multiple rails application and share ressources

Question

Hi all. I have thi intranet I developped back then with PHP.

I handles multiple apps and tools (blog, link sharing, file sharing, events, clendar...), and a big user autenthication system for logging in and authorisation management.

I'd like to start re-building it with Rails.
I don't want to build one big app.
I'd like to build the site as multiple smaller apps, sharing a few common ressources like the user administration system, templates, layouts and navigation...

Rails Engine provide a way to embed an app into another.
I guess I could have a "main" app, embedding all other apps. But I don't feel it's the right way (I may be wrong) if I have 10-15 different apps.

How would you do it ?

Thanks.

Answer 1

We've created applications that are split into 2 - the user facing site and an admin site. We just made 2 separate sites that have the same db and models and their own views and controllers.

This works pretty well and gives us the freedom to treat each site differently in terms of security and deployment.

I don't have any experience in going farther than that.

Answer 2

Check out ActiveResource - it is designed to allow you to use RESTful webservices as if they were ActiveRecord objects.

I'm working on a project now with a bunch of separate sub-apps that are pure web services (no UI). There's one "main" application that has all the UI and handles login/authentication, and then accesses the others via ActiveResource.