We hit the same problem you're describing while developing one of our Rails applications. We essentially wanted to be able to use our ActiveRecord models in the clientside code. To that end, we wrote Jester. Jester "mirrors" your models in the same way that ActiveResource does - by interacting with your RESTful controllers. This allows you to do things like "User.find('first', {name: 'billy'})" or "User.save" on the client side.