Before we get started, let me introduce each component:

• Ruby : if you are reading this blog, you more than likely know at least a little bit about, what I consider, one of the most enjoyable programming language out there. It’s also a very flexible language that lets us do some interesting things. I could have chosen Python to do the same project but that’s a whole different topic. For this project we will do something Ruby excels at: reopening existing classes and injecting more code.
• Rack: a webserver interface written in Ruby and inspired by Python’s WSGI. Basically, it’s a defined API to interact between webservers and web frameworks. It’s used by most common Ruby web frameworks, from Sinatra to Rails (btw, Rails3 is going to be even more Rack-focused than it already is). So, very simply put, the webserver receives a request, passes it to Rack, that converts it, passes it to your web framework and the web framework sends a response in the expected format (more on Rack later).
• CouchDB: Apache’s document-oriented database. RESTful API, schema-less, written in Erlang with built-in support for map/reduce. For this project, I’m using CouchRest, a Ruby wrapper for Couch.

Goal: Log Couch requests and analyze data

Let’s say we have a Rails, Sinatra or Merb application and we are using CouchRest (maybe we are using CouchRest and ActiveRecord, but let’s ignore that for now).

Everything works fine but we would like to profile our app a little and maybe optimize the DB usage. The default framework loggers don’t support Couch. The easy way would be to tail the Couch logs or look at the logs in CouchDBX. Now, while that works, we can’t really see what DB calls are made per action, so it makes any optimization work a bit tedious. (Note that Rails3 will have some better conventions for logging, making things even easier)

So, let’s see how to fix that. Let’s start by looking at Rack.

Rack Middleware

Instead of hacking a web framework specific solution, let’s use Rack. Rack is dead simple, you just need to write a class that has a call method.
In our case, we don’t care about modifying the response, we just want to instrument our app. We just want our middleware to be transparent and let our webserver deal with it normally.

Here we go … that wasn’t hard, was it? We keep the application reference in the @app variable when a new instance of the middleware is created. Then when the middleware is called, we just call the rest of the chain and pretend nothing happened.

As you can see, we just added some logging info around the request. Let’s do one better and save the logs in CouchDB:

Again, nothing complicated. In our rackup file we defined which Couch database to use and we passed it to our middleware (we change our initialize method signature to take the DB).
Finally, instead of printing out the logs, we are saving them to the database.

W00t! At this point all our requests have been saved in the DB with all the data there, ready to be manipulated by some map/reduce views we will write. For the record, you might want to use the bulk_save approach in CouchDB which will wait for X amount of records to save them in the DB all at once. Couch also let’s you send new documents, but only save it to the DB every X documents or X seconds.

As you can see, our document contains the timestamps and the full environment as a hash.

All of that is nice, but even though we get a lot of information, we could not actually see any of the DB calls made in each request. Let’s fix that and inject our logger in CouchRest (you could apply the same approach to any adapter).

Let’s reopen the HTTP Abstraction layer class used by CouchRest and inject some instrumentation:

Again, nothing fancy, we are just opening the module, reopening the methods and wrapping our code around the super call (for those who don’t know, super calls the original method).

This is all for Part I. In Part II, we’ll see how to process the logs and make all that data useful.

By the way, if you make it to RailsSummit, I will be giving a talk on Rails3 and the new exciting stuff you will be able to do including Rack based stuff, CouchDB, MongoDB, new DataMapper etc..

It was encouraging to see so many people excited about what’s being ported over from Merb and the new options available to people who are currently limited by the existing stack. For those interested in pushing Rails further and doing stuff out of the norm, here are my slides. Arthur Zapparoli from Brazilian Rails squad recorded most of the talk and told me he will upload the video ASAP. You can also read Yehuda Katz’ blog which covers what he talked about.

It was really great to meet a lot of new people as well as people I only knew via IRC/IM/twitter.

It was a great honor to finally meet Dan Kubb (DataMapper), Ninh Hernandez-Búi & Hongli McLovin Lai (Phusion), Peter Cooper (RubyInside), Raimonds Simanovskis (Oracle adapter for AR), Arun Gupta (Sun/Glassfish),  Jeremy Hinegardner (crate), Michael Maxilien (IBM), Dana Jones (railsbridge), Zach Zolton & Geoff Buesing (CouchRest) and of course the Brazilian crew (lots of awesome .br guys came this year, I’m looking forward to RailsSummit) and last but not least, the French speaking crew (I’m glad to see Ruby is picking up back home). (I know I’m forgetting people… sorry about that)

It was also really nice to talk with some experts like Dave Astels, Aslak Hellesøy, Rich Kilmer, David Chelimsky, Ryan Brown, Derek Neighbors etc.. to get their feedback on various projects I’m working on.

Leaving Vegas, I feel like the Rails community is expanding quickly (it was the first RailsConf for 1/4 to 1/5 of the attendees) and that the community is organizing itself to welcome a new audience (better documentation, great initiatives like railsbridge.org, willingness to help), as well as trying to be more available to the ‘Enterprise’ world.

These feelings were enforced during our Rails Activism BOF and after talking with 3rd party developers and sponsors really trying to solve problems that newcomers to Rails are now facing. This is an exciting time.

This release is mainly targeting new developers and Windows users wanting to install the full Merb stack. Others can simply update their dependencies if they use the dependencies.rb file or install the new gems if nothing is bundled and no hard dependencies are set.

Merb is a metagem which installs a bunch of other gems (merb-core, DataMapper and a lot of small gems). The problem was that Merb was trying to install DM and dm-types, unfortunately, dm-types had a dependency on a gem which couldn’t be installed on Windows. All of that is now fixed and Windows users can install Merb 1.0.11 without having to manually pick the gems they need.

This release also includes a fix for people using CouchRest, a CouchDB Document Mapping DSL.

Merb 1.1 is still planned to be released in April. A majority of the work has been done, but since Yehuda and myself are going to be traveling, the release will be slightly delayed.

The great news regarding Merb 1.1 is that, on top of being fully Ruby 1.9 compatible, and using action-orm, and being closer to Rack, Yehuda and Carl have been working on the router to make it awesomer and ready for mountable apps

Stay tuned for more news.

update: People using CouchRest or another CouchDB ORM/DSL make sure you define your resources route with an identifier:

resources :articles,        :identify => :id

Otherwise, resource(@article) won’t work. (This is usually done by the merb orm plugin and I might add it to CouchRest in the future)

Merb::Config[:max_memory] has been fixed and now polls for memory usage every 30s instead of 0.25s. (memory is set in KB)

This new version also uses DataMapper.repository instead of Kernel#repository (DM and Vlad related bug fix)

We are still on schedule for Merb 1.1 which is planned for early April. (If you install Merb from our edge server, the latest version should already be Ruby 1.9 compatible)

Key items on the agenda were:

• Ruby 1.9
• Mountable apps
• migration path to Rails3

After spending some time arguing back and forth, we decided that few things had to happen before we could migrate the current slices to pure mountable apps. Freezing the releases while waiting to get that done doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Therefore, here is the plan for Merb 1.1:

• Ruby 1.9 full compatibility (with the very appreciated help from Maiha and Genki (preview of their work there)). Because Merb depends on different gems, we also need to work with 3rd party developers to make sure Merb’s dependencies are Ruby 1.9 compatible

• Merb helpers (fixes, enhancement and missing helpers)

• Make Merb controllers, rack endpoints. This is a fully transparent change for the framework users. By making this switch, we offer more flexibility to the router (you can mount a sinatra app for instance) and we adopt the same approach as Rails 2.3 making the transition to 3 much easier and facilitating the implementation of mountable apps. Again, this is an internal change and you won’t have to change anything in your application.

• Router optimization, Carl has been working on few tricks/optimizations for the router that will be available in 1.1

• Namespacing. If we want to make every single application, a potential mountable app, we need to namespace our applications. This is something we already do with slices, but currently generated applications are not namespaced. We are planning on doing that for 1.1 (backward compatible) to make mountable apps easier.

• ActiveORM. ActiveORM is an ORM abstraction layer developed by Lori Holden (AT&T interactive) which helps with helpers and other parts of your code accessing your ORM directly. For instance, the errors_for method need to be implemented differently depending on the underlying ORM. ActiveORM offers mapping for the 3 major Ruby ORMs: ActiveRecord, DataMapper and Sequel but let you hook to it if you want to extend ActiveORM to support your own ORM.

There is plenty to do but we decided to still try to have an expected release date: around the end of March. As always in the OSS world, this is something we hope for, not a promise

What about Merb 1.2?

1.2 will focus on mountable apps and we hope to get started on a separate branch before we release 1.1. However, mountable apps are hard to spec and we need a better feedback from the community. Tell us what you like with slices and what you don’t like. Let us know how you would like the new mountable apps to work. Be as precise as possible. (you can leave a comment here or on the mailing list)

• Yehuda has been blogging a lot about the work done on the merge.
• I have been busy working on probably the awesomest CouchDB Ruby DSL/ORM.
• I have been working with the Rails Activists on the new wiki and many other projects.
• My sister is visiting from France (most of my free time is not spent in front of a computer anymore :p)
• I’ve been playing with MacRuby (see the end of the post)
• Ohh and spent some time maintaining Merb and preparing 1.0.9

Merb 1.0.9

Merb 1.0.8.1 has some issues with the merb-cache settings set in init.rb being called twice when you use some Rake tasks. (rake db:automigrate for instance).The problem is due to the fact that the rake tasks load the dependencies twice:

• Merb rake file loads all of your app dependencies and their rake tasks. (for instance rake db:automigrate is a rake task coming from merb_datamapper)
• The task you are invoking might start merb itself to load the models etc.. and starting Merb reloads the dependencies.

Dependencies have the option to have a require block. A require block is a Proc that gets called when the dependency is being required. In the case of 1.8.1, we added a default block to set merb-cache. The problem was that the block was being set and called twice and merb-cache was complaining that the default cache was already setup.

To fix this issue we worked on a band-aid type solution (read: kinda evil but ok). Even if you start Merb multiple times, the init.rb file will no only load once and the dependency require blocks will only be called once. However, in the case of merb-cache, the setup block is being called everytime you go through the bootloader. That’s why we added a verification on the block itself. In the long term, we are going to fix things nicely and optimize the way merb-cache loads.

We also addressed some other issues. Some people have been pointed out issues with some merb-helpers and patches were provided by the community (thanks a lot).

Talking about patches, we also accepted a patch fixing a small problem with merb-auth and some open-id servers.

Ruby 1.9.1: We started going through all the different places were things are not compatible yet, most of the work that needs to be done right away is focused on the router. Carl has been working on that and you can check his branch to see how we are doing. During the next week we will try to get things ironed out, we still don’t know how we are going to deal with the fact that action-args uses parsetree which is not 1.9.1 compatible.

The upcoming version also gets a brand new feature: memory monitoring by the merb master process. The master process checks that the workers don’t use too much memory ( you can set what you consider beign too much memory using Merb::Config[:max_memory]) and if one of the workers reaches the limit, it does a kill -1. It then waits a configured amount of seconds (defaults to 5) then kill using -9.

Finally, we also fixed a bunch of tiny issues.

1.0.9 should be released in the next few days.

MacRuby

Finally, because for those interested in MacRuby here are my slides from last night’s SDRuby meetup:

• Foy Savas, author or the “merb way” wrote a very well written post on “Rails monoculture”
• Pat Eyler, wrote an article asking if Rails and Merb would be better together.
• Ben Aldred, tell people to stop worrying and start loving Rails 3.
• fotonauts.com a Rails and Merb Photo website developed by an ex-apple team, was featured in TechCrunch. Fotonauts is the perfect example of an app that will bain a lot from the merge.
• Yehuda has been blogging a lot about every single step and even though most people are enjoying a well deserved break, you can read the details of the work started on the merge.

Basically, the work started, we are getting familiar with the rails code base and are optimizing things slowly but surely with a focus on testing JRuby. The Merb router is being optimized and ported over to Rails 3.0. Rails and Merb developers will be able to stick to their DSL (so we stay backward compatible). Merb bootloader is also being ported over without breaking the backward compatibility. Finally, ActiveSupport is being broken down in more manageable/independant chunks so people will be able to pick only what they want to use. A “mini” version is also on the work.

• Merb 1.0.7 got released yesterday with a bunch of bug fixes.
• merb_sequel 1.0 should be released sometime this week and i’m planning on adding rails i18n syntax support to merb_babel.

Overall, the news was very well received, just look at the tweets out there and the comments on Yehuda’s and Rails’ blogs.

Interestingly enough, the Rails community really embraced this decision and just got totally excited about the perspective of merging merb’s philosophy and expertise into Rails. If you re-read David’s blog post you can see that it’s a real homage to Merb.

The rest of the internet sounds pretty happy about the news, here are few posts:

• arstechnica.com
• internetnews

Even Zed the entertainer thought it was a good thing:

“I honestly didn’t think that would ever happen. I just assumed that Merb
would eventually wipe out Rails by being the better framework, or they’d
wipe each other out soon.

So, congrats are in order. You guys are finally grown-ups and now have
the chance to make something better.”

Some merbists like Jade Meskill really understood what we are trying to do while some other ones got really mad at us.

I think a pattern emerged from the negative reactions:

• Why merge when we are about to win?!
• What does Merb win by being merged into Rails?
• Why not merge Rails into Merb?
• You are killing innovation by killing the competition
• You screwed us over and now I have to go “back” to Rails
• Rails 3.0 won’t even be as good as Merb 1.x
• The Rails team won’t let you do what you have to do to merge Merb into Rails
• DHH is a jerk

Let me quote Yehuda:  “Calm yourselves ”.

Why merge when we are about to win?!

This is probably the most rational argument. This is also something the Merb core team considered for a little bit.
Merb is gaining huge momentum and the target audience was very reactive to what we did.
People such as Yellow Pages, Wikipedia and even Adobe started using or looking seriously at Merb because of its focus on modularity and performance.
We started building an elite community and we were pretty proud of that.

But take a moment to think about it. Our goal has never been to hurt or compete with Rails. Our goals were to get modularity, performance and a strong API. If the Rails team really wants that, and will work on it, why should we work against each other?
It’s not about winning or losing. It’s all about the long term plan of your framework, about the people involved and the community behind it. We had to take ourselves out of the equation and consider what would be good for the Ruby community.

What does Merb win by being merged into Rails?

People seem to easily find things we might lose but have a hard time finding things we are gaining.
Looking at it on the very short term, this is probably correct. The merb team will have to learn how to work with the Rails team.
We need to understand the reasons behind every single aspect of the code and find ways of merging things nicely.
On top of that, we still need to work on merb as promised. (see Wycats’ post)

However, in the long term we get all the benefits of Rails:
- stability
- community
- traction
- experience
- don’t have to always justify why use Merb instead of Rails

But more importantly, we extend our team.

Most people using a framework might not realize what it is to work on a big Open Source project.
When you work on an OSS project, people come and go, and that’s why you usually have a core team of people you can rely on.
Merb has a lot of contributors but a small core team of 5 people (Yehuda, Carl, Daniel, Michael and myself).
Managing a project, such as merb, requires a tremendous amount of time and patience. Rails has the same problem with its core team of 6 people. People have lives, business, projects etc…

Joining two teams of experts in developing web frameworks in Ruby is like if in the next Soccer World Cup, the French and Italian teams would go on the fields at the same time to beat other teams. 22 players on 1 side, training and learning together. American readers, please imagine the Giants and the Colts facing the Green Bay Packers (I was told I don’t like the Packers).

Long term, you will get better quality and more frequent releases. We also have different world views and backgrounds which means we will learn a lot from each other, again that means better code for you guys

Why not merge Rails into Merb?

That’s actually a good question. We discussed maybe using merb-core as a base for Rails 3.0
The truth is that Merb 2.0 would probably be as big as Rails but more modular.
So we have the choice to keep on building on top of Merb 2.0 or deconstruct Rails.
As the Russians say: ‘ломать — не строить’, it’s always easier to take things apart

Rails already has a test suite, it has already been tested on the wild for a while and its internals are known to many developers. Taking apart the code to make it faster, cleaner and more modular is arguably easier than reinventing the wheel. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter from which end you start as long as you end up with the same result.

Some people even asked to come up with a new name for the merged project. Meails, Mr Ails, Reverb, Reab were suggested. While I thought it was a joke, some people were really serious. Can you imagine if during the recent bailout, banks changed names every time they were purchased by another bank? People would be super confused and would not even know where to send their mortgage payments.
On top of that, Rails has a huge user base compared to Merb and has an immense brand recognition in the world at large, it would be foolish to throw that away.

Let’s not be chauvinistic and see what’s best for all.

You are killing innovation by killing the competition

Again, a good point but my question to you is: Should we stay in the competition just for the sake of it?

Rails clearly told us: we want what you have and we would love you to work with us. So the options were:

• tell them to go to hell and let them try to redo what we already did and know how to do.
• accept to work with them and make Rails a better framework.

Option 1 would keep the competition alive, but now you have 2 groups of people trying to do the same thing and being better at different aspects. The community gets confused and communication breaks.

Option 2: we lose the Merb vs Rails competition, but we double the amount of people working on Rails and therefore increase the change to make it better faster.

We went for option 2 and we know there is already some competition out there and there will be more coming up soon. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect us not to merge because we want to keep the competition going.

You screwed us over and now I have to go “back” to Rails

Yehuda will blog about some more detailed examples as we are making progress, but you need to stop thinking that Merb will just be absorbed into Rails.
If Rails just wanted to add some “Merb flavor” to Rails, they would have just taken whatever they needed and would not be interested in a merge.
See Rails 3.0 as a new generation of Rails, whatever we promised you for merb 2.0 plus all the goodies from Rails. Rails users will still have their default stack and all choices will be made for them (like in the current Merb stack). The difference for standard Rails user will be better performance, a static API and an option to go off the “golden path”.
Merbists won’t lose the stuff they like in Merb, stacks, full support for DataMapper, Sequel and other ORMS, jQuery or other JS library, opt-in solution using just rails-core, better core isolation, built-in RSpec and webrat support, slices, merb-cache, merb-auth and all the other key plugins that will be ported over.

To be able to achieve all of that, we will have to make some infrastructure and code modifications.

Rails internals should end up:

* way less magical (even Merb uses some magic, but we’ll make sure to keep it to a minimum)
* returning shorter and cleaner stack traces
* cleaner (required for the new API)
* better isolated (required to increase the modularity)
* alias_method_chain won’t be available at the public API level (we probably still will need some chaining mechanism internally, but that’s a different story)

So, no, you don’t have to go “back” to Rails. In fact, imagine you could do exactly what Rails does but with the performance and modular architecture of Merb. That’s what you will get with Rails 3.0.

Rails 3.0 won’t even be as good as Merb 1.x

I think I mainly replied to this question in my previous answer.
There is no reason why Rails 3.0 won’t be better than Merb 1.x.  Actually, I believe our API will actually be even better. With the help of David, the existing Rails core team, and the Rails community, we will be able to define an awesome API that will change the way ruby web development will be done.
The merb API is great but we already know some of its limitations and we don’t have as many plugin developers to work with. Working with plugin developers is something I’m personally excited about. As a Rails developer I have been really frustrated when using 3rd party plugins and trying to develop my own.
Having a well tested, developed against, public API will make all the Rails 3.0 plugins so much better. And because Merb plugins already use an API, we will be able to port all the plugins over, so it will be at least as good as 1.x
Also, we are going to work on real app benchmark tests to make sure the performance gain is at least as good as what we have with Merb.

Migration will be easy and well documented. We are not giving up on the Merb book and it will be very useful to explain the Merb way to new comers wanting an idea of the new stuff in Rails 3.0. It will also be the best source of information to migrate your app to Rails 3.0.

Talking about migration, we promised to give you a sane migration path when it will be time to migrate.
Again, don’t freak out because we are changing the name, the spirit of Merb will keep on living.

The Rails team won’t let you do what you have to do to merge Merb into Rails

In all honestly, I was worried about that. I was wondering if all of that was not an evil scam planned by DHH to kill Merb as it was getting a good momentum. I like conspiracy theories and it sounded pretty good.
To my surprised, after a few private conversations with David, I realized that he was genuinely interested in making Rails better for people and fulfill the needs of people who need more flexibility.
Just re-read his blog post http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/12/23/merb-gets-merged-into-rails-3. After what he said, how can he back up and just keep Rails the way it is? And why in the world would he want that to happen?
It’s a team effort and we have already spent hours and hours discussing some details. I can promise you that the Rails team is very excited about the new stuff that’s coming up. But don’t forget that it’s a merge and we are reconsidering some of the stuff we did in Merb to better re-implement them in Rails 3.0.
So far, I haven’t seen any of the Rails core team member tell us, no you can’t do that because that’s not the way it’s done in Rails or because we just don’t like it.

DHH is a jerk

Recently, in an interview I gave to rubylearning.com http://rubylearning.com/blog/2008/12/18/matt-aimonetti-why-on-earth-would-you-ignore-merb/ I mentioned that a big difference between Merb and Rails was the way we were dealing with the user base.
I quoted David from an Interview he gave to InfoQ http://www.infoq.com/interviews/David-Hansson back in 2006.

As part of the merging evaluation process we literally spent hours talking back and forth. I had a seriously hard time believing that Rails and David honestly wanted to change their world views. How can you go from saying what you said in 2006 to adopting what Merb is pushing for: letting the framework bend to make what each developer wants if he doesn’t want to follow the “golden path”?

Interestingly enough, David recently addressed this point on his blog. http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/36-work-on-what-you-use-and-share-the-rest

“I wanted to take a few minutes to address some concerns of the last 4%. The people who feel like this might not be such a good idea. And in particular, the people who feel like it might not be such a good idea because of various things that I’ve said or done over the years.”

First thing first, David addresses the minority of people worried about his image and what it means for them.
So, David actually cares about hard core merbists and he wants them to join the fun. I personally see this as something very encouraging!

A recurring theme we hear a lot is that Rails becomes whatever DHH/37signals needs/wants. If DHH needs something new, it will make it to Rails, if he doesn’t need it, it won’t.

David has a very simple and almost shocking response: DHH != Rails

David is really happy with Rails. Rails satisfies his needs but he knows that some people out there need/want something more/different.

“I personally use all of those default choices, so do many other Rails programmers. The vanilla ride is a great one and it’ll remain a great one. But that doesn’t mean it has to be the only one. There are lots of reasons why someone might want to use Data Mapper or Sequel instead of Active Record. I won’t think of them any less because they do. In fact, I believe Rails should have open arms to such alternatives.”

So, you can still think whatever you want about David. What’s important is that Rails is more than David. It’s an entire team of people with different needs and different views.

DHH isn’t a dictator and based on concrete examples such as the “respond_to vs provides” discussion, I can reassure you that David has been very receptive to arguments and never tried to force any decision because he thought it was better.

While people still try to find some drama in a hypothetical war between Rails and merb …

The Rails team and the Merb team announced today that they will work together on a joined version of the 2 frameworks. This is so exciting! Nobody believed it could ever happen (I personally, seriously had my doubt).

Yehuda had a great post laying out the plan and explaining things in details. Check out David’s post explaining why he wants us to work together and his vision of a better Ruby world.

I have to say that I have been impressed by the Rails core team and especially David (DHH).

I’ve known David for few years now and we had long (sometimes heated) discussions on topics like i18n/l10n for Rails. David is known to be a very opinionated person. But if you come up with the right arguments, he can be convinced and when that happens, he is willing to move forward and shake things up.

This merge is a concrete example that David and the rest of the Rails team care about Rails and the Ruby community more than we usually give them credit for. As a unified team, we are going to change the way web development in Ruby is done!

But what does it mean for you?

I put together a FAQ video which, I hope will answer your questions.

Matt Aimonetti: message to all merbists

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Matt Aimonetti from the merb core team and as you might have heard, a big announcement was made earlier today.
I did this video to hopefully answer the questions you might have.

Q: So what’s the big news?

• merb and Rails team will work together on the next version of their frameworks
• merb 2.0 and Rails 3.0 share the same common endpoint
• we realized we now have the same objectives and agreed on all the key principles.
• merb will provide Rails with agnosticism, modularity, improved performance and a public API.
• The end product will be called Rails 3.0 but what real matters is that it’s a huge gain for the entire community.

Q: What??? I thought there was a war going on between Rails and merb, what happened?

• There was no war between Rails and merb
• We created merb because Rails was not fitting us
• We wanted better performance, more choices/ more modularity and a Public API.
• The Rails team now embraces these concepts and want Rails to follow them, so why not work together?

Q: Wait, does that mean that merb is dead?

• Absolutely not!
• merb development won’t stop, we are going to keep on releasing updates until Rails 3.0
• clear migration path, and upgrading to Rails 3.0 will be as trivial as upgrading from Rails 2.x to Rails 3.0

Q: What does the timeline look like?

We just started getting together to discuss the technical details. We are shooting for a release at RailsConf 2009. However it’s hard to estimate this kind of thing so, again, that’s just an estimate

Q: I just started a merb project, so what now?

I’m sure you had valid reasons to use merb, you needed modularity, performance and a solid API.
Keep on using Merb, we won’t let you down. The good news is that the next version of merb (Rails 3.0) will be even awesomer!

Q: What about my client who was looking at using merb for his new project?

If your client is going to be using merb for valid reasons (and not just because it’s not Rails) they should still use merb, but with the full understanding that they will end up using Rails in 6 months or so. Again, Rails 3.0 will have what pushed you to use merb.

Q: I’ve been involved with the merb-book, what will happen with this project?

• Rails 3.0 won’t get released right away
• still need awesome documentation
• if we look at Rails 3.0 as merb 2.0, we can easily imagine how the current work can be extended to the new version
• Rails team will also include an evangelism team which I will be part of, so will be able to focus more on projects like the book

Q: I’ve been working on a merb plugin, what should I do?

Keep working on it! We’ll assist you with the migration process and the new solid API.

Q: What if I still have questions?

Come talk with me, or any member of the new team. We’ll be open to hear your questions, worries, frustrations.
merb always valued its developers and we will continue to do so but on a bigger scale.

Lori Holden worked on merb_sequel and we should release a 1.0 release of the plugin in a few days.

I’m sure this news comes as a shock for many of you, but try to not see Rails 3.0 as the way Rails is right now. Imagine a version of Rails with true modularity and agnosticism (sequel, DM and AR will still be supported) and the same type of performance as what you get with merb. In other words, the Rails world is about to discover the power of merb!

Here is what Yehuda explicitly says in his blog post:

• Rails will become more modular, starting with a rails-core, and including the ability to opt in or out of specific components. [...]
• We will port all of our performance improvements into Rails. This includes architectural decisions that are big performance wins.[..]
• As of Rails 3, Rails will have a defined public API with a test suite for that API. [..]
• Rails will still ship with the “stack” version as the default (just as merb does since 1.0), but the goal is to make it easy to do with Rails what people do with merb today.
• Rails will be modified to more easily support DataMapper or Sequel as first-class ORMs. [..]
• Rails will continue their recent embrace of Rack, which [..] will improve the state of modular, sharable logic between applications.
• In general, we will take a look at features in merb that are not in Rails (the most obvious example is the more robust router) and find a way to bring them into Rails.

Personal perspective

I’m personally really excited about this opportunity. I had a hard time believing that we could work together but I was proved wrong. We have many challenges in front of us, but watching the two teams working together is very reassuring.

I’m also glad to see that we will have a Rails Evangelism team that I will be part of. I strongly believe that one of the many reasons why merb has been so successful is because we work and listen to our community. We have put a tremendous amount of energy into trying to understand what you guys need and what you like and dislike. In return, we have seen many people working hard on the wiki and the merb-book.

Can you imagine doing that with almost 4 Million Rails developers?

I’m also looking forward to working with a team and reaching to even more people.

Other news related to the merge:

• The RubyOnRails website will keep a trace of this historical moment: http://rubyonrails.org/merb
• The merb training scheduled for Jan 19-21, in partnership with Integrum, will still take place, and if you want to get a head start and learn about the things that will make Rails 3.0 totally kick ass, I’d suggest you join us.

If you have any questions, or if you want me to publicly answer questions on your blog please contact me. I’ll do my best to get back to everyone.

Jason Seifer

Today I’m interviewing Jason Seifer known for the funny envyads and the weekly RailsEnvy podcast.

Jason Seifer:
I would encourage people to try merb if they’ve been holding out at all. It’s a great time to get involved and the community is great, too. Also, I’ll be starting a merb podcast soon so stay tuned for that. Thanks very much for talking with me.