I posted about AR and thrift earlier (or late last year) and was reminded this morning that I didn’t follow up that post with the solution. So here it is: Download spike code.
Now it has been a while since i solved this, and the versions may have changed since then, but I do remember that the “tricksy” part was boot-strapping ActiveRecord. That was done using the supplied boot.rb. Once that’s done, you can happily run the thrift server daemon based on textbook instructions and the rest is history. Your models and all the ActiveRecord learnings you’ve had with rails can be re-used quite happily.
Happy coding.