Model using external data source?

Absolutely. The objects in your model don’t have to inherit from ActiveRecord or any other part of Rails if you don’t need them to. Just write up an object to wrap the API calls.

Rails used to have a module called ActiveResource for this, but it seems nobody liked it enough to keep it working, so it was dropped. In my current project, I just have to read from the REST API, and https://github.com/archiloque/rest-client is working well so far.

-David

Great. Thanks for pointing it out.