Rails and Merb Ruby Web Frameworks Merge

An anonymous reader writes "The Merb and Rails Core Teams today announced a major merger; the two projects will become one, and be released some time in Q2 of 2009 as Rails 3. This is great news for lots of folks who worried about the potential community fracture, as well as great news for all the developers who will now have an all-around better option for programming Ruby. Read more about the details in Yehuda's blog post, or at the Ruby on Rails blog."

Comments

Re:WTF

[larry bagina]

Merb is like a lightweight RoR. Lightweight because it's more optimized and leaves more decisions up to the end user (as opposed to RoR's one size fits all). Ruby on Rails v3 will be more modular so if the shoe fits, you wear it. But everyone else can replace the parts they don't need or want.

Re:Who cares

[KagatoLNX]

For debugging, New Relic provides some awesome tools that allow introspection of delay and timing at a function dispatch level. If you're serious about Rails, New Relic is for you.

As for file-backing your Rails app, my company has had huge success with GFS. It can be a beast to maintain sometimes, but it will crank out the IOPS behind very hungry RoR apps fairly well. It also requires shared block devices, though, so it may not be for you. The S3 plugins for Merb and Rails also go a long way to scaling everything but the code itself (which should be manageable on even the surliest NFS deployment).

We've done some really good work with Rails deployment. There are a ton of ways to deploy it, but I think that is more reflective of the variance in people's deployment requirements more than anything else. Phusion's Passenger and Engine Yard's deployment work are helping to lay down best practices here, and we'd be glad to talk to you about smoothing out the deployment process.

Rails is definitely a good application for teasing out some of the pathological behavior in NFS, but that's not necessarily a bad thing about Rails. It's already used by some to test the pathological niches in new Ruby releases (e.g. "Does it pass the Rails test?").

Working with Yehuda and Ezra on a daily basis, I can safely say that you can expect to see a lot of attention to performance and refactoring some of the cruft that has inevitably popped up in Rails' large codebase. DHH has a great vision and Yehuda has great attention to detail. I don't want to imply that "Rails needs Merb" or "Merb needs Rails", but I expect some really good results from the collaboration.