Posts Tagged jruby

Meet the merbists: Jason Seifer

Posted by Matt Aimonetti in Meet the merbists, merb on December 20th, 2008

Jason Seifer

Jason Seifer

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

Matt Aimonetti: Hi Jason, could you please introduce yourself and tell us what you do for a living?
Jason Seifer: My name is Jason Seifer and I do mostly web development for a living along with podcasting and screencasting.


Matt Aimonetti: How did you get started with Ruby, what’s your background?
Jason Seifer: As far as my background goes, I have a degree in Psychology from the University of Central Florida. I got started with Ruby by way of learning Rails. I used to do some hacking on perl and php but never anything for full time work until Rails came along. I fell in love with the Ruby language that way.


Matt Aimonetti: You chose to learn and use Merb, could you please let us know why and how that happened?
Jason Seifer: Doing the Rails Envy podcast, I’ve been keeping up with the latest merb news for a while now. Along the way I’ve been extremely impressed by how the merb team handles things, listens to its users, and implements new features. At the same time, I’m pretty lazy when it comes to coding so I wanted to wait until the API was stable and version 1.0ish before jumping in to building merb apps. I have a lot of Rails experience so picking it up wasn’t too hard.


Matt Aimonetti: Do you have some Merb projects available online we can look at? what was your experience so far?
Jason Seifer: I don’t have anything online at the moment but I am working on a couple of things that I hope to release in the coming months. Working with merb is a pleasure most of the time, though it’s pretty easy to get confused with some common rails functions that differ slightly by name (before/before_filter, etc) if you’ve been doing Rails for a while. One thing that’s really nice about working with merb is how compact and easy to understand the framework code is. It’s very easy to jump in and see how something works if you’re having trouble.


Matt Aimonetti: What is your favorite aspect of the Merb framework?
Jason Seifer: As far as features go, I love run_later. It’s pretty nice not to have to run a message queue for decoupling simple things like sending email from the request/response cycle. There are a number of smaller features like that which make merb nice to work with.

My favorite aspect of merb, though, is the stable api. It’s very comforting to know that by upgrading to the next stable point release of the framework that I’m not going to have things that break. This of course doesn’t mean that a stable and comprehensive test suite isn’t important but it is one less worry.


Matt Aimonetti: Could you please mention an aspect of Merb you hope to see being improved in the near future?
Jason Seifer: If you had asked me this question a few weeks ago I would have said documentation, but that itch is being scratched by the merb book. Though not exactly merb, I’d really love to see DataMapper get JRuby compatibility so we can get the full stack on JRuby for deployment. That would be very exciting what with everything going on in JRuby land at the moment.


Matt Aimonetti: Thank you for your time. Anything else you would like to add?

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.


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Merb 1.0 RC5

Posted by Matt Aimonetti in Misc, News on November 3rd, 2008

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:

  • Webrat integration out of the box. (see example)
  • Improved Merb bundling
  • spec view helpers now use nokogiri (with rexml as fallback )
  • new have_selector spec helper using CSS3 compatible selector.
  • The entire Merb spec suite now runs correctly on JRuby & Windows.
  • Once again improved jRuby support.

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.

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