Ruby application session parameters

[Thomas D'andrea jr.]

I am trying to create multiple applications that perform different
processes on our servers. The important aspect is that I want to
somehow put into a session or configuration file data from all of these
applications so we can manage the sessions from one place.

Example if XML:

<session>
<app id="test1">
<user>user1</user>
<pass>pass1</pass>
<err>false</err>
<email address="(e-mail address removed)">true</email>
</app>
<app id="test2">
<user>user2</user>
<pass>pass2</pass>
<err>false</err>
<email address="(e-mail address removed)">true</email>
</app>
</session>

I have also tried this:
<conf.rb>
if $CURRPROC == 'test1'
@conf = {
'id' => 'test1',
'user' => 'user1',
'pass' => 'pass1',
'err' => 'false'
}
end

if $CURRPROC == 'test2'
@conf = {
'id' => 'test2',
'user' => 'user2',
'pass' => 'pass2',
'err' => 'false'
}
end

<app.rb>
$CURRPROC = 'test1'
require 'config.rb'

puts @conf['id']
puts @conf['log']

This seems to work to read, but I am not sure if this is what I should
be doing because it seems hard to change a single value and write it
back out to the file. In this case, if an error occurred during
processing, I want to change the 'err' value to 'true' so that future
processing could take that into account when that process was run. I've
just had a heck of at time getting to parse XML and read/write
correctly, or getting the ruby code to save easily with small changes.
Other examples I looked up are good for a single configuration file for
a single application, but I am trying to have a central configuration
file for multiple applications. Any suggestions are appreciated of
course.