[Rails] Combining rails intrAnet and public site.

Hello, everyone!

I was wondering if somebody has some insight on this issue.

[h]A little background:[/h]
I work for a midsize electronic manufacturing company with 2 people in
IT dept - a network admin and a developer (me).

We've been using rails to migrate from an old dBase and VB based system
to build internal company IntrAnet that does things like label printing,
invetory control, shipping, etc.

[h]The Dilemma[/h]
Right now we need to replace an old website that was done in Java, that
would connect to our internal system for out clients to use. We want to
be able to pull information like live inventory, order placement,
account statements.

[h]Actual Question[/h]
Does anyone have any suggestion on how to accomplish this in a better
way?

Here are three options that I see:
a) Build a separate Rails app on a web server, that will connect to the
[b]same[/b] DB that our internal app connects to.
+++ Pluses:
Live data - same thing that our internal apps see, i.e.
orders are created in real time, inventory is depleted right away,
--- Minuses:
Potential security risk, duplication of code - i.e. I need to
duplicate all the controllers, models, views, etc. that deal with
orders.
b) Build a separate Rails app on a web server, that will connect to [b]a
different[/b] DB from our internal app.
+++ Pluses:
Less security exposure.
--- Minuses:
Extra effort to sync web DB and internal DB, extra code to
handle inventory depletion and order # creationg ,duplication of code -
i.e. I need to duplicate all the controllers, models, views, etc. that
deal with orders.

c) Expose internal app to the web
+++ Pluses:
all the problems from above eliminated
--- Minuses:
A lot more security headaches. Duplication of login systems -
one for web - one for internal users using LDAP.

So any thoughts? Anyone had similar problem to solve?
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