Apologies for the long post! I''m working on an application which is standard Rails fare: database-centric, hosted, with RESTful (-ish!) controllers exposing methods as web services. Nothing out of the ordinary. But at some point I''m going to run into a barrier as my audience is quite conservative and certain organisations that form a very important part of my target audience will want, and probably demand, the _ability_ to deploy their application onto their own servers, even if they end up using the hosted service day-to-day. This is no huge business obstacle as I intend to open-source the app anyway. Naturally, I''d hope and expect the majority of clients to use the hosted version. The reality is that they are more likely to if they know that they can use the app locally if the company managing the hosted version goes belly-up. However, what I don''t want is all the data they are storing in the locally-deployed app to be locked away from the outside world. Although they may be entering data into their own deployment, I''d like the centrally hosted application to keep a read-only cache of their data as up-to-date as possible, at least updated once every 24 hours, and make it available to other users to the extent the owner of the data permits (these rules are embedded in the app already, so "all" that would be required is for the ''slave'' deployment to communicate updates to the ''master''). Naturally clients would have the ability to turn off this synchronisation. RDBMS-native replication doesn''t seem to make sense as I have no control over the application deployments. I''m looking at using web services to communicate updates from one deployment to another, but would rather avoid re-inventing the wheel as I can imagine this getting tricky quickly. Are there proven architectures for this situation? Should I be looking to simultaneously update the local and remote application or batch updates each day? I''m not talking about high volumes of data or large number of deployments. And I don''t want to over-engineer an architecture that I hope will be used very little! Any thoughts very welcome as I go into this, Toby -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---