Jeff Dean's blog
ActiveHash is a simple base class that allows you to use a ruby hash as a readonly datasource for an ActiveRecord-like model.
ActiveHash assumes that every hash has an :id key, which is what you would probably store in a database. This allows you to seemlessly upgrade from ActiveHash objects to full ActiveRecord objects without having to change any code in your app, or any foreign keys in your database.
It also allows you to use #belongs_to in your AR objects.
ActiveHash can also be useful to create simple test classes that run without a database - ideal for testing plugins or gems that rely on simple AR behavior, but don't want to deal with databases or migrations for the spec suite.
ActiveHash also ships with:
- ActiveFile: a base class that will reload data from a flat file every time the flat file is changed
- ActiveYaml: a base class that will turn YAML into a hash and load the data into an ActiveHash object
ActiveApi allows you to define a schema in Ruby, and use that schema to convert ruby objects to xml. An example looks like this:
Schema.version(:v1) do |schema|
schema.define :article do |t|
t.attribute :id
t.string :title
t.date :published_on
t.has_many :comments
end
end