I don't see why you can't just include ActiveRecord or datamapper and connect to the same DB as your app (assuming you want to allow your workers to have access to the application database) you might have to copy the models over though. But then if you want to keep it simple you might not need to copy your models over, since models for workers are usually much simpler than the application's model.

This is of course talking about the stand-alone version. And I am talking of course about using it in tandem with the rabbitmq for job storage.