<p>The rails books and web pages I've been following have all stuck to very simple projects for the sake of providing complete examples.  I'm moving away from the small project app and into a realm of non-browser clients and need to decide where to put code that is shared by all involved parties.</p>

<p>The non-browser client is a script that runs on any machine which can connect to the database.  Browser clients write commands into the database, which the script examines and decides what to do.  Upon completion, the script then writes its result back.  The script is not started by the RoR server, but has access to its directory structure.</p>

<p>Where would be the best place for shared code to live, and how would the RoR loader handle it?  The code in question doesn't really belong in a model, otherwise I'd drop it in there and be done with it.</p>

I'd put the shared code in the Rails project's
```
/lib
```
directory and consider making it a custom Rake task.