At Dev Fu!, we started coding all of our new applications using DataMapper a few months back.

For awhile, we were waiting for Rails 3 to be released (which has DataMapper support baked in), but we realized we were preventing ourselves from using a tool that we love (and prefer to ActiveRecord).

This screencast is intended to get you started with DataMapper development, if you’re experienced with ActiveRecord. I plan on doing a more in-depth DataMapper screencast in the near future but, if you’re itching to try DataMapper and you’re familiar with ActiveRecord, this might be the screencast for you!

In this screencast:

• We test-drive the creation of a model
• We add validations
• We add a many to many association
• We do it all with ActiveRecord and DataMapper
• We do it all outside of Rails (so you can see how to use these libraries without Rails)

Enjoy!

UPDATE: After posting this, I got a lot of feedback regarding ActiveRecord + Arel. You might want to check it out! Screencast coming soon about it? We’ll see! Happy new year :)