Store pointer to object in database

Question

I have a rails app, where every user can connect his Facebook account, and give permission to send messages from the app wich is using. So, every logged user with connected Facebook account must has one Jabber Client authorized with his Facebook-id, token etc, I'm doing it with xmpp4r GEM.

The connected facebook account with token, and facebook data is stored in Database as Mailman object.The Mailman class has also methods to control the Jabber client like run_client, connect_client, authorize_client, stop_client, get_client etc. The most important methods for me are connect_client and get_client.

class Mailman < ActiveRecord::Base

@@clients = {} unless defined? @@clients

def connect_client
    #some code

    @@clients[self.id] = Jabber::Client.new Jabber::JID.new(facebook_chat_id)

    #some code
end

def get_client
    @@clients[self.id]
end

#other stuff

end

As you can see in the code, every Mailman object has get_client method which should return Jabber::Client object, and it's true, it is working, but only in a scope of running application, because the @@clients variable is stored only for specifc running app.

This is problem for me because I would like to use cron task to close idle clients, and the cron task is using different initalization of the app, so Mailman.find(x).get_client will return always nil, even if it returns Jabber::Client object in a production app.

How are you dealing with such issues? For example, is it possible to get a pointer to memory for Jabber::Client object and save it to database, so any other app's initalization could use it? I have no idea how to achive that. Thank you for any advice!

Answer 1

Even if you manage to store a "pointer to memory" in your database, it will be of no use to a cron job. The cron job is started as a new process, and the OS ensures that it won't have access to the memory space of any other process.

The best way is to create a controller to manage your running XMPP clients. This will provide a restful API to your cron job, allowing you to terminate idle clients using HTTP requests.