Rails 3 == Merb 2.

Ezra and I, and Yehuda as well (if I may speak for all of us) believe that Merb and Rails are so entirely antithetic that they are complementary, once you get beyond the fact that they’re both Ruby web frameworks.

We’ve all seen the negativity regarding Rails in the outside world, deserved or not. Can Rails scale? We’ve said yes from the beginning!

Some people don’t agree with the Rails way. We’ve also seen that those who do agree with the Rails philosophy have gained *enormous* advantages -vs- other languages and frameworks.

I hope for a future where *both* Rails and Merb succeed beyond everyone’s wildest dreams. This can happen if we grow the Ruby pie!

First of all, I guess I left out a few IMHOs. This is how I interpreted the messages flying around in the past days (and earlier) – and those messages, among others are:

http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/11/14/merb-rails-myths-language-popularity-and-other-zenbits/
Tom’s comment:

‘While many people in the community represent Merb as a competitor to Rails, Ezra and Engine Yard, Inc. have never seen it that way. From the very first day, Merb was designed to complement Rails.’

http://brainspl.at/articles/2008/05/21/does-it-have-to-be-a-competition-between-rails-and-merb
“It seems like a lot of folks out there want there to be a battle royal between Merb and Rails. I just wanted to dispel this myth. (…) Merb stands on its own merits just as Rails does.”

First off, I’d like to make something very clear. Engine Yard doesn’t make any decision on what Merb should do and how to do it. However, we do value Tom and Ezra’s advise because they are experts in their domain and it would be foolish not to. Therefore, it’s true to say that they both do influence Merb.

Merb’s lead developer is Yehuda Katz, who’s also an Engine Yard employee. Maybe that’s the confusing part. We might be used to companies like Microsoft which have a reputation of dictating. In this case, EY never forced anything on the Merb team.

Your statement about Tom/Eza does not sound fully accurate to me. Few months ago, during one of his talks, Ezra was saying that Rails was faster to get up and running but if you were spending a bit longer setting up you will get more flexibility in the long term using Merb (sounds like they are competitors to me).
Note that his comment was made before Merb Stack was finished. In reality, both Merb and Rails are web framework and with Merb Stack, you can do exactly what you would do with Rails. So it’s a bit hard to still say that merb is not a rails competitor.

However, Merb offers a different approach to web development, you can have a 1 file app “a la Sinatra”, a tiny framework with the bare minimum or a full fledged web framework “a la Rails”. Having the luxury of easily and reliably pick and choose what components you need makes Merb totally different from Rails. That’s maybe what you took as a disagreement since people might have commented on different aspect of the framework.

I hope this helps.