Let me start by stating the fact that I consider myself a ruby / rails
novice (above newb, just enought to be dangerous, perhaps ... 
)
I have an issue that relates to the ruby-openx gem, which allows ruby to talk to an OpenX ad-server via XMLRPC, However, I think my problem is kind of a more basic problem related to Rails, but I am sure it is also probably due to the way that certain things are implemented in the gem, so I'm hopeful I can get some basic guidance here on a problem that has me stumped.
OpenX::Services::Base has a section of code that the other modules / classes in the openx gem use when they extend this base class to retrieve the connection to the OpenX server that looks like this:
@@connection = nil ... def connection= c   @@connection = c end
def connection   unless @@connection and @@connection.id     @@connection = Session.new(configuration['url'])     @@connection.create( configuration['username'],                          configuration['password']                        )   end   @@connection end
The connection is saved as a class variable, and evidently in Rails, at least in production mode or when config.cache_classes = true, classes appear to persist past an initial request so they don't have to be reloaded on every request.
The OpenX XMLRPC API expects authenticated sessions to pass back a session id that is retrieved when you successfully login via the XMLRPC API. The OpenX::Services::Session class handles this just fine.
However, what ends up happening is that the session times out due to lack of activity, and the XMLRPC API does not provide a way to tell if a session is expired or not, so it typically causes 500 internal server errors in the Rails app that's trying to communicate with OpenX.
What I would like to do is basically have a private copy of the openx classes that exists only during a rails request and do not persist past the end of the request, independent of the config.cache_classes setting. I believe this would solve the problem well enough for me to be able to use as a work-around.
Is it possible to do in Rails what I am asking? I think the reason this is not an issue with the library as written is that it was not written with Rails usage in mind, but for usage with either a cron job or a CLI ruby script instead; however, I have a need for it to operate properly in a Rails environment.
I'm not keen on either re-writing the gem code, nor am I interested in keeping the session alive via a cron job, as that's a hack IMO, and not a solution.
So, if anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them. Thanks.
The gem's code can be found at GitHub - aasmith/openx: A ruby interface the the OpenX XML-RPC interface, for anyone who is curious.