Wow, I almost wish it were April Fools Day...<p>For someone who loves Merb and had decided to leave Rails behind (as much as possible), I have very mixed feelings about this. If this means Rails will start to feel more like Merb, fantastic! Otherwise?<p>I have a feeling it'll be a long while before I <i>really</i> know how to feel about this...<p>It'll be interesting to see how well this merger actually works in practice. It seems like when large companies merge the results are often underwhelming. Can a merger of large open source projects work? Will the different cultures clash?
Wow, big news.<p>I'm mixed on this. One of the strengths of Rails was that it was <i>the</i> dominant Ruby web programming framework. This meant that virtually the entire community was behind Rails when it came to web app development - unlike some other languages, which have several frameworks competing for the crown. But Merb has recently started to give Rails a run for its money. Fortunately, the learning curve between Merb and Rails is relatively small.<p>So on the one hand, it's great that the Ruby community won't splinter between two competing frameworks.<p>But on the other hand, Merb was really creative and innovative, and I'd hate to see that innovation slow down as it becomes the Establishment.
Impressive! How often do you hear about two open-source projects merging? Forking is much more common. I can't even recollect other instances of merging.<p>Best of luck to the two teams with making it work!
Sounds like they smelled some code duplication and committed to a cross-project refactoring.<p>Exciting to see some smart people uniting over respect for a common problem.
So, I posted this on one of the threads for other blog posts about this, but that tread doesn't have much going on, and I want to see what people have to say about it:<p>I'm a merbist and think this will be good for both the Merb and Rails communities.<p>That said, I'm a little afraid it will shaft the other Ruby frameworks (Sinatra, Camping) and possibly straight ruby too. People might make interesting things only compatible with Rails.<p>When Merb was a pretty big, active minority, it was more compelling to go out of one's way to make interesting libraries (ORMs, gems, etc.) easily compatible with anything ruby.<p>Now, people might at the least write things specifically setup for use w/ rails in such a way that it's inconvenient to nonrails ruby, and at worst make Rails plugins for things that could be useful libraries for all of Ruby.<p>Rails is gaining modularity, but I fear Ruby overall might lose it. Even after Rails and Merb merge, rails!=ruby.
Do I detect the hand of Benchmark Capital here?<p>Edit: I wrote the orginal comment in a hurry - but what I was getting at was that Engine Yard took quite a bit of cash from Benchmark. I somehow doubt that a move like this could have happened without their approval, and I have to wonder if they instigated it (and why...)
I love this. I was just torn about learning Merb and worried about how the Rails community was slowing down. This should inject some much needed energy as well as introduce some of Merb's awesome features into Rails. Great move.
This is awesome.<p>Merb has become the 'go to' framework for Rails developers like myself who are unsatisfied with several Rails design choices.<p>However, the technical differences between the two are actually not that big. A merge of Merb and Rails concepts sounds like a good thing, all 'round.<p>Three cheers for open-source development and civil relationships between developers.
My brain <i>knows</i> it's the middle of December, but I had to check to make sure it wasn't April 1st. This is <i>exactly</i> the type of headline we see every year on April 1st. Crazy that it's real.
I once heard someone suggest that the "Rails" architecture should just be a standard that could be implemented for any language. This seems to be a step in that direction. Sounds pretty good to me.
DHH confirmed to going with current logo. Are that guy delirious?
<a href="http://url.davegrey.com?06609" rel="nofollow">http://url.davegrey.com?06609</a>
this is huge. and it turns out that yesterday i was considering learning merb instead of rails. but for the moment i will learn rails. what is the best one to learn at the moment in order to be ready for rails 3?