I'm going to develop an urban game using a telco API for phone geolocation and sending/receiving messages. A player would pick up one of the scenarios, move around the city and when he hits a given location, he gets a message and possibly has to answer it.

I'm wondering, what approach would be the best in my case. I came up with this general idea:

1. Web application as a user interface (user registration, players ranking, scenarios editing) written in Ruby on Rails.
2. Game server (hosting games, game logic like checking players location, sending and receiving messages) written in Ruby.
3. Database (users, scores, scenarios etc.), probably MySQL or someother open source DB.

I want to learn Ruby and RoR, that's why I chose these language and framework. Do you think it's a good choice for a game server?

Another question: is this project division good? I mean, I have little experience with Ruby and Rails - that's why I'm asking. Maybe it's better to have web application merged with game server and somehow have the server hosting RoR application do the tasks like mobile phone pinging and message sending? How would that be performed?

Maybe this is worth mentioning: the API is RESTful, most results are JSON, few are XML.