Url forwarding

Hi,

Just beginning to look into RoR, have a question about routing.

Have a need to create a RoR front end to an application written in
python, which do have a lot of REStful URLs. Python application
running and listening to localhost:8080 and I need to talk with that
from RoR on localhost:3000.

ie, http://localhost:3000/xxx/xxx/xxx
should be routed to
hrrp://localhost:8080/xxx/xxx/xxx

writing rules for all URLs seperately in outes.rb is an option, is
there any other way of doing this ?

To put it in another words, in the RoR controller can I get the whole
URL instead of getting the action/param and recreating the forwarded
path from components ?

Thanks much for your advice.

Regards,
kashmu