Shared Domain

[Geoffrey_Wiseman]

This seems like something that people must have already worked out, so
I'm probably just not finding the right combination of search terms.

If I were to share some domain classes between one Rails application
and another -- what's the right way to make that happen? For
instance, imagine I'd already written a retail banking site with
CreditCard, CreditCardTransaction, and other credit card domain
objects, as well as bank accounts and so forth. Now i want to build
an internal application for credit card fraud, and i'd like to re-use
my domain objects and share a database, but host this application
internally.

What's the "Rails Way" for that? For shared non-application-specific
functionality, I imagine I'd use a plugin, but it doesn't sound like
the right choice for share domain or application-specific code.

Thoughts?

TIA

  - Geoffrey

[Michael_Latta]

If you want to share the Ruby classes but have separate databases you should probably look at engines or the related approaches to carving out part of an app and sharing them (models, controllers, views, etc). If you want them to share the same database then just use REST web services to share the functionality.

Michael

[Geoffrey_Wiseman]

Even with a web service, assuming I want to unmarshal the message into
an object, I'm looking at having a shared domain class, no? I mean,
yes, I could write the class in both applications or use svn externals
to get there, but neither of those seem ideal.

I'll look into Engines; I've heard the word, but that's about it, so I
might as well know what it means.