Merby Christmas!

khudgins writes:

I like it, for the most part. Rails is a known quantity, and from a business perspective, it's pretty easy to hire a Rails developer - once you evaluate their competency, if you know Rails, you pretty much know it. With Merb, you have to learn the component parts, and Merb people like picking their favorite components, which is great, until you realize you're using an obscure ORM for a particular feature you love, and you need to hire someone to help and then you have to train them.

So, now, with Rails 3, you get to have your cake and eat it, almost, by picking the components you want, having sane default options, and Merb's clear performance issues. As long as you're not morphing the whole thing (Hmm, let's not use ActiveRecord, and I hate erb templates, and I really want this testing framework...) you have some common ground for your new folks to work inside.

And, best part, there seems to be no janky hate-fest. The lovey-dovey blog posts are odd, but so far seems good.

samsm writes:

I'm optimistic!

Merb wasn't floundering before this announcement, I don't think there is a ton motivation for Merb folks to migrate from a successful direction unless they felt that their principals would be preserved. Merb became a serious split because there wasn't a good compromise with Rails core, now they are rejoining because common ground has been found. 

If Rails can acquire the better aspects of Merb, then Merb is redundant (the reverse would also be true). This (hopefully!) gets us to that point really quickly by consolidating Merb/Rails brainpower. That would mean no "crap, if only I was using Merb/Rails" moments.

What I really want to see is competition from some other framework which is conceptually different from Rails and Merb. Not something minimalist like PHP or Sinatra, a serious competitor which rewrites rules and would be absolutely impossible to merge with either.

tkadom writes:

IMHO, and I hate to be a pessimist about this, I think merb is rails done right and is only missing the porting of some rails goodness.  I think this announcement effectively kills merb for some performance improvements in rails.  It does not sound like there will be a rewrite of rails, or a move to the merb framework + rails features.  I would have thought it was a merby xmas if this announcement meant rails3 =  merb2 + rails functionality rather than rails 3 = rails2 + merb performance enhancements.

samsm writes:

Thumbs up.