Soup is a bit of everything, summoned from nothing. Soup is like an imaginary friend - comforting, and will often talk to you, but when you look closely, they don't exist. Terrifying. And so: require 'soup' Soup.prepare Soup << { :name => "James", :skills => "Bowstaff, nunchuck" } # ...much later... s = Soup['james'] s.skills # => "Bowstaff, nunchuck" Soup << { :mane => "Lush and thick" :teeth => "Sharp and ready" :position => "Above my bed!!!" } The point is that you can set any attribute on a Soup data, and it will be persisted without care. With reckless abandon, really. The data can be stored using anything - Soup doesn't really care much about the underlying persistence layer. I've written implementations using DataMapper, ActiveRecord and Sequel... there are other implementations of course. Unknowable implementations. Terrifying implementations. You Fool! Warren is Dead! (c) 2008 James Adam, MIT LICENSE. Yeah. 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