Meta-search engine with Rails?

Rails
1

Hi all,

We built a litte application which is a little bit like a meta search
engine, ie, a user make a request and then we launch a few “bots” that
will search the informations. Now, the web front end is written with
Rails, and, when we receive a request, we open a named pipe and we
launch a multi-threaded python program (the bots).

Now, in order to have a lot more control on the entire process we’d
really like to rewrite the whole application in a “Rails way”. So, is
there already some component that we can use to launch a multi threaded
(or something like that) program inside a Rails app? Has anybody ever
built a similar application?

Thanks in advance,

yk

2

I don’t recommend to fire threads off the rails dispatcher process.
Every
fastcgi request has a timeout constraints. So you’re better off using
Linda-like systems where you can place a request for processing and
check for
the result at the later time.

Check out Rinda at
http://segment7.net/projects/ruby/drb/rinda/ringserver.html

Kent.