= ActiveRecord::Mutex

== Description

This gem provides a Mutex that is based on ctiveRecord's database connection.
(At the moment this only works for Mysql.) It can be used to synchronise
different ruby processes via the connected database.

== Download

The latest version of the <b>active_record_mutex</b> source archive can be
found at

* http://www.ping.de/~flori

== Installation

You can use rubygems to fetch the gem and install it for you:

  # gem install active_record_mutex

You can also put this line into your Rails environment.rb file

  config.gem 'active_record_mutex'

and install the gem via

  $ rake gems:install

== Usage

If you want to synchronize method calls to your model's methods you can easily
do this by passing a mutex instance to ActiveRecord's synchronize class method.
This mutex instance will be named Foo like the ActiveRecord was named:

  class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
    def foo
    end

    synchronize :foo, :with => :mutex
  end

If you want more control over the mutex and/or give it a special name you can
create Mutex instance like this:

  my_mutex = ActiveRecord::Mutex::Mutex.new(:name => 'my_mutex')

Now you can send all messages directly to the Mutex instance.