How to connect Social Media Streams (Twitter, Instagram) in Rails

I am doing my first baby steps with Rails (version 3) now. I'd like to create a simple app catching data from the twitter/instagram/ API. Thankfully there are already gems doing the heavy lifting with connecting to the services, providing the data. Now I wonder what the best-practice is to add this functionality to Rails correctly.

My feeling is the best way is to create a new non-DB Model for each service I want to include and create some scopes, which I will then use in the controller. The scope definition includes the functional code, instantiating and using the twitter/instagram gems to get the web service's data.

1. Is this model/scope approach right or did I miss something?
2. In future I might need to cache all the fetched data to handle common API request limitations. Is there any good approach for this?

I'd appreciate your thoughts or examples/resources on this 开发者_如何学JAVAtopic.

I think in this situation a standard class would be ok e.g.

class TwitterImport

  def get_tweets
    # Download tweets
    ...
    # Create tweets
    Tweet.create(.....
  end

end

I created something similar recently. I created a folder called scripts in my app directory and stuck a class in there called import.rb. Because this file lives within the app directory it automatically has access to the Rails goodness i.e. existing Models etc.

I then set it up as a rails runner script, you run it via teh console from your app's root directory:

rails runner -e development TwitterImport.get_tweets