Too Cool for Internet Explorer

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

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!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Merb Training at RubyLearning is very much still on! That makes this training basically the first training focusing on the future features of Rails 3, and a great way to get ahead of the game.

Marcos Ricardo said...

Well said Satish.

Earlier adopters must show earlier solutions !

Matt said...

This title is misleading :p

On top of everything you said, merb will keep on living and be supported for a very long time. (we will keep on fixing major bugs even after rails 3.0/merb 2.0)

You still got me to read your article so congrats ;)

- Matt

Marcos Ricardo said...

Matt, about the misleading...

Sorry, but that is the idea :)

About the future we will see, but I honestly believe Your first focused job must be: bring all Merb customers to Rails 3.0.

In other words, You need to work on Rails 3.0 the way current Merb customers become confident on changing to it, with minor (or none if possible) changes in their projects.

After that you may have just one focus (Rails 4.0, I hope).

All the best and a great 2009 !