Difference between Active Model, Active Record and Active Resource

ruby-on-rails-3 rails-activerecord activemodel activeresource
Arif Usman picture Arif Usman · Sep 29, 2012 · Viewed 16.9k times · Source

Is there anyone who can help me by defining the exact difference between Active Model, Active Record and Active Resource. I have done enough googling in order to find the exact difference, but didn't get anything concrete which can tell the exact difference between them. Right now they all look same to me. So please give me the appropriate answer with some concrete points.

Answer

richardaday picture richardaday · Oct 7, 2012

Rails 3 is designed with modularity in mind. Each module has its own purpose and functionality.

ActiveModel: This component was created in Rails 3. They took all the model related parts that did not have a database requirement of Rails 2 ActiveRecord and moved it into ActiveModel. So ActiveModel includes things like validations. More information: http://www.rubyinside.com/rails-3-0s-activemodel-how-to-give-ruby-classes-some-activerecord-magic-2937.html

ActiveRecord: This is the component that associates a class to the database. This will give the class functionality such as methods that make it easy to pull records from the database (An example is the find method).

ActiveResource: Similar to ActiveRecord. However, instead of being backed by a database, an ActiveResource object is backed by another application through a web service API. More information: http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596521424/activeresource_id59243.html

(Couldn't figure out about ActiveBase... where did you hear it from?)

Related questions

Rails update_attributes without save?

Is there an alternative to update_attributes that does not save the record? So I could do something like: @car = Car.new(:make => 'GMC') #other processing @car.update_attributes(:model => 'Sierra', :year => "2012", :looks => "Super Sexy, wanna …

Read More
ActiveRecord find and only return selected columns

edit 2 If you stumble across this, check both answers as I'd now use pluck for this I have a fairly large custom dataset that I'd like to return to be echoe'd out as json. One part is: l=Location.find(…

Read More
ActiveRecord OR query

How do you do an OR query in Rails 3 ActiveRecord. All the examples I find just have AND queries. Edit: OR method is available since Rails 5. See ActiveRecord::QueryMethods

Read More