Merb is DEAD

Well, I don’t think so, in fact I think Merb is now immortalized, just because it twist a fundamental concept on Rails World, which is: “Rails is an opinionated Framework”.

You can see all sort of reasons, why people adopt Merb or Ramaze instead of Rails and use other alternatives on the full stack like Rack and Thin, all over the place.

Since Rails could now dress all Merb good features, reasons to start developing a “new” framework against Rails, will start to diminish from now on.

Here are the basics on Rails 3.0 prototype on the table:

"Rails is a full-stack framework and will remain so, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t also make it possible to run with less than the full monty (“rails myapp --core” and “rails myapp --flat”)."

"Merb has a lot of Rails pieces rewritten to be faster. We’ll be bringing all that good stuff over."

"Rails will always have a default answer to every question within the stack. But you will have the option of your choice on: TESTING, ORM, TEMPLATING, AJAX. Yes, we’ll have a default, but we shouldn’t have any form of discrimination against alternatives."

"Too many plugins break when Rails is updated. The Merb guys committed to a public API with tests to ensure that it wouldn’t break. They’ll bring over that line of thinking and give Rails 3 a tested and documented API for extensions that won’t break willy-nilly with upgrades."

"The probably-overly-optimistic goal is to have at least a beta version ready for RailsConf 2009 (May 4 to 7) in Las Vegas."

On the other hand, there are some side effects over the earlier adopters of Merb: speeches, keynotes, courses and books and even applications, are now on the spot. What to do?

Rails’ official blog announcement.
Rails’ official site announcement.
Yehuda’s blog announcement.
Ezra’s blog announcement.
Matt Aimonetti's blog announcement.
Carl Lerche’s blog announcement.
Lori Holden's reply.
EngineYard’s blog announcement.

Well, that is it.

Marry Christmas!