Brainspl.at

Merb-0.9.1 Developer release

Posted by ezmobius Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:17:00 GMT

We’ve released the 0.9.1 version of merb to the merbivore.com gem server. This release has a lot of polish and is getting very close to being stable api wise after the big 0.5.3 → 0.9.x refactoring.

You can see the big changelog here.

I’m pretty happy with how the codebase is shaping up, this was a major refactoring of merb and we’ve come out with a very clean system. Performance is improved quite a bit from older 0.5 versions of merb.

We’ve split the code base into multiple parts, merb-core, merb-more and merb-plugins. merb-core is the heart of the system, it has the rack abstraction along with the dispatcher, router, controller and view layers. You can make very fast, small footprint services and apps with just merb-core.

merb-action-args
merb-assets
merb-builder
merb-gen
merb-haml
merb-mailer
merb-parts
merb-test

And merb-plugins consists of:

merb_activerecord
merb_datamapper
merb_helpers
merb_param_protection
merb_sequel
merb_stories
merb_test_unit

Wow that’s a lot of gems! Merb is built in a modular way that allows you to cherry pick features so you never have to load code you aren’t going to use. This helps keep the memory footprint down when building service style apps. But still allows for all the advanced features you want.

You see, Merb is built on rubygems and Merb plugins are just rubygems so plugins have the same standing as built-ins code loading wise. Merb is just begging you to peek under the hood to see how it ticks ;)

To make things easier to get started we still have a merb gem that will install all of merb-core and merb-more for you. You should uninstall all of your old merb gems before you install the new version.

$ sudo gem install merb -y --source http://merbivore.com

Merb development has moved to GitHub for source control and Lighthouse for ticketing.

The best place to get merb questions answered is still #merb on irc.freenode.net. We will have a wiki and a google group up shortly.

Let us know what you think, kick the tires and all that. After it settles for a few days we will push it to rubyforge, hopefully by this weekend.