Rails based hub and spoke distributed web site. Anything out there?

I need to design a system where we have a central Rails website for maintaining product information, some of which is rich media (photos, movies etc.) and we need a way to efficiently access this central information from a series of information kiosks. The central system will be used to update and control access to the information and the kiosks will primarily display this with no editing required. The only traffic which is likely to move back from kiosk to central site is usage information which is not bandwidth constrained.

My initial thoughts are to run separate Rails servers on each kiosk and 'somehow' (eg. scheduled rake task) synchronise the relevant content from the central server to each kiosk. Note that the kiosks 开发者_运维技巧won't all have the same content on them as it will be location dependent. We might need to employ something like Amazon S3 storage to host content.

Another option would be to employ some sort of advanced caching (ie. more advanced than standard browser caching) on each kiosk to minimise network bandwidth requirements and speed things up. I've used 'squid' before but only as a general purpose site cache server, I don't know if it can step up to what I need here.

So, my question is whether anyone out there has attempted anything like this before and what sort of architecture you found to work. I'd be interested in hearing if there are any Rails plugins which are relevant to my requirements and/or any smart caching servers.

Many thanks, Craig.

I know it's not possible for every application, but you could generate static cache of the content and use a scheduled task to update each kiosk from that cache. Then you don't have to maintain rails servers in each one.

Depending on what you're running on kiosks, if you need a bit more interactivity, you can run a sinatra or a camping app. Those are a fair bit lighter weight than rails. You can communicate through XML. If you're running a flash app on the kiosk, look at rubyamf library.