title: Rake task's access to web app's global variables
body: <p>I am writing a simple Ruby on Rails app with very little knowledge of ROR. The app is to periodically query Twitter and Instagram, fetch the feed for certain users and store them someplace which it can then quickly access when a request for a particular user's tweets or photos arrives.</p>
  
  <p>I was thinking of writing a rake task that will do the part of periodically fetching the tweets and instagram photos.</p>
  
  <p>If the webapp is using a global variable to fetch the feed from, can the rake task access this same global variable and update it?</p>
  
  <p>Or is it a must to use a database so rake and the webapp can update/access the same data?</p>