Of all the new and reimagined code in Rails 3, ActiveModel and ActiveRelation rank amongst what I find the most interesting. I’m excited that they potentially lower the bar to implementing one’s own data layer. If you’ve got some custom backend or datastore, writing a nice API around it has previously been quite the endeavor. To get it working is one thing; to make it as pleasant to use for application programmers is another thing entirely. ActiveModel and ActiveRelation have been extracted from ActiveRecord and make the task of building one’s own model layer far easier.
My presentation for RailsConf 2010 focused on what ActiveModel and ActiveRelation provide and how one can use it to write cleaner code in domain models, how to make your models feel more like ActiveRecord objects, and how to use ActiveRelation to build your own persistence layers.
I hope you find the slides educational. Further, I’ve posted the examples on GitHub so you can play along at home. If you’re particularly interested in ActiveRelation, I hope you’ll find the examples useful as a starting point to using that library.
