The Rails team and the Merb team announced that they will work together on a joined version of the 2 frameworks. This is really very exciting. Nobody believed it could ever happen.
Two very popular frameworks for Ruby are now getting merged. The new release is going to be "Rails 3.0".
Some of the key ideas that they’ll be taking with them from Merb into Rails 3 are:
* Rails core: Yes, 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 3 will make it easy to run just a bare minimum and then allow you to opt in just the stuff you want, if that’s necessary for your particular situation. Think “rails myapp—core” (and “rails myapp—flat”).
* Performance optimizations: Merb has a lot of Rails pieces rewritten to be faster. We’ll be bringing all that good stuff over. We’ll also bend the architecture in the places where that’s necessary for a big yield. In short, Rails 3 will get all the performance attention that the Merb guys are known for.
* Framework agnosticism: Rails will always have a default answer to every question within the stack. If you don’t care about testing frameworks, you’ll get test/unit. If you don’t care about which ORM, you’ll get Active Record. But some people do care and want something else. Some people want RSpec for testing, others want to use Sequel or Data Mapper for ORM, others again prefer Haml for templating, and some might prefer jQuery for Ajax. All these people should feel like Rails is welcoming them with open arms. Yes, we’ll have a default, but we shouldn’t have any form of discrimination against alternatives.
* Rigorous API: Too many plugins break when Rails is updated because it’s not clear where they can safely hook into the internals and when they’re monkeypatching and should expect things to break. 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.
Yehuda had a great post laying out the plan and explaining things in details. In his words,
"There aren’t any clear points that the Merb and Rails team disagree on anymore. Merb has been around for roughly two years now, and we’ve proved out our ideas by use in real-world applications (like Yellow Pages, SproutCore, Powerset, Defensio, etc.). Given this philosophical convergence, it just didn’t seem like there was much to gain by continuing to duplicate effort and spend time and energy fighting each other.
I think it’s important to acknowledge the Merb community for building something super-awesome. I really hope that we’ll all stay in this together, help each other in the coming months and in the transition to Rails 3.
Rails will be putting together a new evangelism team, which will include Matt Aimonetti (Merb core team member and evangelist) and a few other people doing Rails evangelism work. This group will be responsible for, among other things, helping the community get where we’re going. Their job will be to listen to you."
Even David had also warmly welcomed the entire merb team and community.
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.
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