However, today is a special Monday. It’s the first Monday of the year and I have a special announcement!

During the Rails/Merb merge announcement, it was mentioned that I will be joining the soon to be created “Evangelism team”.

A few people asked me what being a “Rails Evangelist” means. To reassure my parents and close friends, no, I didn’t join a new cult worshiping locomotives. However, I still think that public transportation should be improved, especially in this time of crisis (but that’s a different topic).

A technical evangelist, is usually someone who knows and uses a specific technology and thinks others should look into it. This is something I’ve been doing for Merb while being part of the core team. I initiated and helped organizing MerbCamp, re-did the wiki, started working on the merb-book, spent time looking for and listening to users, spent time with third party developers and people pushing Merb to a new level (YellowPages, Wikimedia and many others).

This interaction with the end users and the third party developers is something the entire Merb team valued a great deal and I always felt it was something the community really appreciated.

As part of the merge, it was agreed that we would push things further and have a team within the Rails team to take care of “communication”. Rails is a bigger project than Merb and communication between the dev team and the users isn’t always something easy to do.

That’s why we have formed a separate team that will help communicate and support the community better. We now even have an official page on the Rails website itself

The Rails Activists

The A-Team just got announced on the Rails blog.

Instead of being called “evangelists”, we are going to be called “activists”. I think part of the argument was that the E-Team doesn’t sound as good as the A-Team.

We started with team of 4. You might not know them yet but they all are brilliant people and I’m really glad to be working with them.

Gregg Pollack, from Rails Envy. You might remember Gregg from the Rails vs * commercials or from the Rails Envy podcasts. I’ve known Gregg for a little while and he’s someone you can rely on and always full of energy/new ideas.

Ryan Bates, mainly known for his Railscasts. I only met Ryan once in person, but I’ve always been impressed by his work (don’t tell anyone, but I secretly dreamt of having something like Railscasts but for Merb )

Mike Gunderloy. I actually did not know Mike but I have read and enjoyed his blog and have seen his work on the Rails guides. Mike is an experienced writer and developer. He joked the other day saying that he started programming before any member of the Rails team was even born. Mike is a great addition to the team and I’m looking forward to learning from his experience.

Gregg and Ryan also covered the event, you might want to check their blog posts (Gregg’s and Mike’s)

So what are we going to do?

Pretty simple. We’ve boiled it down to 2 sentences:

The mission of the Rails Activists is to empower and support the worldwide network of Ruby on Rails users. We do this by publicizing Rails, making adoption easier, and enhancing developer support.

if you prefer a few more details, here are some of the tasks we are going to work on:

• Public Relations with media of all sizes
• Ombudsman work to ensure good user-to-user support
• Community Leadership at events and conferences
• Media Organization to help create good promotional opportunities
• Website maintenance
• Documentation efforts
• Developer support

Do we need help?

Absolutely! The idea is not that we are going to do all the work. The concept of this new team is to help organize the community. We are going to build a Rails Network, a network of people involved in local Rails “evangelism”/activism, people contributing and/or translating documentation, third part developers etc…

First thing would be to join the mailing list and share your suggestions, comments, concerns, etc., with us.

Secondly, we have already set up some forums to hear your feedback.

To start off, we are asking people to let us know what they would like to see happening in the Rails3 timeframe.
We have other forums for more general feedback, but we need to work with deadlines so we can prioritize accordingly. Using the Rails3 milestone should help us focus on a short/medium term deadline. Long term and not specific suggestions are welcome in the other forums.

Finally, contact us. You can find multiple ways to do so on the activism team web page.

• 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.

Andy Delcambre

Today, Andy Delcambre is our featured merbist.

Lori Holden

Today, I’m interviewing Lori Holden from YellowPages.com/AT&T Interactive.

Derek Neighbors

Today, I’m starting a new series called meet the the merbists. My goal is to feature various people from our community and ask them a few questions about Ruby, Merb and their projects.

Let’s get started with Derek Neighbors from Integrum.

The good news is that the core team is working hard on improving the state of documentation.

You have the Merb Book on which I am actively work on with a team of 20 people (writers, editors and translators).

You also have the documentation browsing application we are developing to let you browse documentation based on where you are in your app.

And of course, you have the 2 beta books (Merb in Action and the Merb way) plus two other ones in the process of being written (Beginning Merb and Merb: What You Need to Know).

Finally, you also have other resources like the Merb peepcode.

The point being that we are actively working on improving the overall state of documentation. However, if you wish to learn more about the internals, how to some more advanced stuff like writing plugins, building your own stack, knowing when to use what component, I would suggest you attend the training class that Yehuda Katz (Merb lead developer) and myself are giving in Phoenix, AZ, January 19-21.

This would give you a rare opportunity to spend time with some of people directly involved with the day to day development of the framework as well as other like minded developers.

Website:       http://merbclass.com
Curriculum:  http://merbclass.com/curriculum.html
Date:            Jan 19-21, 2009
Location:      Phoenix, AZ

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