The Christmas spirit is spreading…
(via SitePoint » Top Ruby Frameworks Rails and Merb Join Forces)
The much-hyped Rails framework has enjoyed a ton of time in the spotlight over the past 4 years and powers some of the web’s most used sites and applications, including Twitter, YellowPages.com, Kongregate, A List Apart, Scribd, and Xing. But Rails certainly isn’t for everyone. Many people love the way it does things, but dislike the way it endeavors to have an answer for everything. Rails is a full-stack framework that would rather you use the built in pieces to get things done — i.e., Prototype for AJAX, Active Record for ORM, or test/unit for testing.
Merb, on the other hand, is a Rails-inspired framework that endeavors to focus on the core functionality and rely on plugins for everything else. That makes Merb more agnostic when it comes to what technologies you want to use to build your application. Rails developers have always been able to use other frameworks for development — jQuery for JavaScript, or rSpec for testing, for example — but it is generally considered kind of messy. You can’t easily strip out the pieces you don’t like, so you have to pile on the stuff you want to use and rely on plugins to make it all work.
Now, the core teams from Rails and Merb are merging in an effort to bring the two frameworks together for Rails 3, slated for beta release at RailsConf in Las Vegas in May. “We all realized that working together for a common good would be much more productive than duplicating things on each side of the fence,” wrote Rails originator David Heinemeier Hansson in a blog post about today’s merger. “Merb and Rails already share so much in terms of design and sensibility that joining forces seemed like the obvious way to go. All we needed was to sit down for a chat and hash it out, so we did just that.”
