I’ll try to keep the community posted on the latest merb news. Feel free to email me if you want me to feature your app, plugin, tool or blog post.
That’s official, according to Twitter the fight has started.
In this corner, weighing in at XXX LOC, from 37signals in the white trunks: Rails and in this other corner, weighing in at YYY LOC from Engine Yard: Merb!
Yehuda Katz
David Heinemeier Hansson
I wish I had a more aggressive photo of Yehuda, but oh well…
So people love drama, from American Idol to the Elections without forgetting Survivor, Heroes and other TV shows. Few weeks ago there was a tentative from Giles to create some controversy but he did not really work so well. The last big drama we had in the Ruby community was Zed and his infamous blog post…
Once upon a time, in a world where .NET, JAVA and PHP were ruling the internet development world, a not so well known programming language was getting more and more traction in the far east. Ruby, as it was known in Japan, only had very little documentation in English and real ninjas had to translate docs from obscure Japanese writings in order to become enlightened. Nevertheless, a courageous Danish student named David decided to build an application called basecamp using this “exotic” language. David decided to extract a framework from his work for 37signals. He called his framework “Ruby on Rails” and offered it to the world under the MIT license. Pretty quickly, as Ruby was getting more popular in the West, people looked at “Rails” and loved the MVC architecture, the conventions over configuration, testing framework and especially the language: Ruby.
As Rails was getting popular, a man from Polish descent known as Ezra Zygmuntowicz and who was working for Engine Yard got frustrated with some of Rails limitations. He needed something simpler, easier and faster. In fact he just needed a Mongrel handler, a way to process a request really quickly without going through then entire stack and without slowing down the main app. That’s how Ezra started Merb.
Let’s fast forward 2 years. The year is 2008, the place is Orlando, Florida. Yehuda Katz, Merb’s lead developer announces the 1.0 release of a Ruby web framework started 2 years earlier by Ezra. The framework’s selling points are: performance, modularilty, flexibilty. In the mean time other Ruby frameworks were developed such as camping, Sinatra, mack, waves…
As you must know by now, last week, Merb 1.0 got released.
Because we wanted to assure the release was fine, we asked Engine Yard, Apple and YellowPages.com to help us by hiring the NSA to monitor Merb users. After all, we need to know what people complain about so we can fix it ASAP.
Turns out all the echelon monitoring sites were already busy. So we had to go back to good old IRC and twitter search 
The release looks pretty solid, thanks to all the people reported bugs during the release candidate cycle. Thanks guys!
However there are still few points of confusion I’d like to address.
On November 7, Yehuda Katz gave a talk at RubyConf and made 3 major announcements:
- Engine Yard to offer Merb support
- m|a agile to offer professional training
- Merb 1.0 released!
The first announcement is pretty substantial. Engine Yard has been financially supporting Merb by letting some of their staff work on Merb, fly them to different conferences and sponsoring events like Merb Camp. Engine Yard didn’t yet announce the price structure but having the option for enterprise level support for Merb is just awesome.
John Nunemaker made an interesting comment during RubyConf Pivotal Party. Something special about Merb is that it was designed to fit the needs of an audience instead of trying to create a series of tools to build a specific type of website. Having Engine Yard help to finance Merb dev and offer support is very reassuring. It’s something already done by many other OSS projects such as Ubuntu, MySQL etc…
The second announcement Yehuda made was about Merb Training. I’m probably pretty biased since I am at the origin of this project. I know for a fact that a lot of people were waiting for 1.0 to get started with Merb. We are also working on getting more documentation out, and 3 books are coming up. Still, the best way to learn is to sit down with people who know Merb who can teach you the way its intended to be used.
Training will allow you to benefit a lot from being with other people who also share the same desire to master Ruby’s most powerful and flexible web framework.
What’s also really exciting is that Yehuda Katz, Merb’s lead developer, agreed to be a tutor for the course. I can’t imagine a better way to learn. Check this page for more information about the next training session or get in contact with me if you want to organize a training session for your company.
Merb 1.0 went through 5 release candidates and was finally marked as final. In the last few months, the Merb team worked hard to make things easier for people who want to get started in no time.
Let’s quickly look at why Merb is awesome:
As a matter of fact, Merb is going to scale even better in the next few months as we are planning to integrate Swiftiply and do some totally awesome stuff to spawn/reap workers based load. (more about that in few weeks).
Yukihiro Matsumoto aka Matz
“Everyone outside of the Ruby community understands that we only have 1 web application framework, named Rails, but it’s not true in any sense. We have several post-Rails frameworks, which is very good, and I believe in diversity.
Merb has a bright future for the people who are not satisfied by the fixed ways in Rails. I think that Merb will give users more freedom in a Ruby-ish way of programming.
I’m not really a web-guy, so i don’t judge any of them [frameworks], but Rails does some kind of drastic change on the language itself like in Active Support. But Ruby has its own culture and technological atmosphere in the language so that keeping that makes me feel easier.”
By the way, Matz told me this morning that the Ruby core team is working on their own solution for a better GC and it should be available soon. (Ruby 1.9.x)“Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.
Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.”
I guess I could keep on going with other reasons why Merb is so awesome, but let’s keep some for another post
In conclusion, on behalf of the Merb core team, I’d like to thank all the Merb contributors, Ezra Zygmuntowic (creator of Merb), Yehuda Katz (Merb lead developer), Matz (Ruby creator) and finally DHH & the Rails core team. One more thing:
$ sudo gem install merb
$ merb-gen app my-awesome-merb-app
As you might have noticed, we’ve been pushing a lot of Release Candidates out the door. The reason is that we want to make sure 1.0 is really ready for showtime!
We are also getting a lot of bug reports that help us focusing on the main issues. Today RC5 was pushed to a RubyForge mirror close to you and here is a report from Yehuda Katz, Merb lead developer.
This is the final RC before we ship 1.0 final at RubyConf. Here is a really quick rundown of the bugfixes and improvement added to this release:
In other news, we setup a nightly gem server so people who want to be on Edge don’t have to deal with git and we call also test gem releases before pushing to RubyForge. More about that coming up during RubyConf.
Talking about RubyConf, Yehuda and I will be in Orlando enjoying a good Ruby meetup. Come and chat with us if you are interested in starting using Merb, or if you have been using Merb. Also, please come and see us if you hate Merb and care tell us why. We’re looking forward to meet you all.
Yesterday, Yehuda Katz annouced Merb 1.0 RC3 released and today we re released the same version with a hotfix (some dependencies got broken).
Here is a quick sum up:
1.0 final is expected to be released during Ruby Conf.
On a different note, the MerbCamp videos were released today. Check out the videos there.
A big thank to Patrick Crowley and Rob Kaufman for taking care of the encoding videos.
Mislav & Pjhyett’s will_paginate plugin has been a reference in the Rails world for a little while now. The need for Pagination is arguable, but that’s not the point of this post.
There are few existing pagination solutions for Merb, but people moving from Rails and porting a Rails app will be happy to hear that will_paginate is now Merb compatible (DataMapper and ActiveRecord supported).
Mislav worked hard making sure that his next release will be framework agnostic and hopes to support both Rails 2.2 and Merb 1.0. You can see where is at by checking on his agnostic branch.
I did some work over the week end to make sure I could use will_paginate in one of my project. You can see my work there. I also built a temp gem for you to test WP with Merb until mislav releases the final version of the gem (especially if you are lazy and don’t want to deal with git).
