merb-slices

Posted by ezmobius Wed, 21 May 2008 22:13:00 GMT

There is a great tutorial/screencast about a new merb feature that I really like a lot called merb-slices. This is now part of merb-more, contributed by a long time friend of mine, Fabien Franzen(worked on ez-where with me)

merb-slices are “Little slices of MVC cake”. These are self contained merb apps with models, controlers, views and assets that you can distribute as rubygems. You can mount a merb-slice at a specific point in your router definition and you can override any part of the slice up in your main app. So in a way these are similar to what Rails-Engines promise, except merb-slices are built into the framework and will not break when merb itself is updated.

Check out the tutorial/screencast for a peek at how merb-slices work.

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Does it have to be a competition between Rails and Merb?

Posted by ezmobius Wed, 21 May 2008 20:12:00 GMT

It seems like a lot of folks out there want there to be a battle royal between Merb and Rails. I just wanted to dispel this myth.

Merb was written because it scratched an itch that I and many of my hosting customers had, mainly memory footprint, speed, concurrent requests and simple maintainable code. This does not mean that Merb has to be thought of as a Rails competitor. Merb stands on its own merits just as Rails does.

I feel that both of these frameworks have great strengths and weaknesses and that they compliment each other in many ways. Face it Merb would never be around if Rails had not come first. And I see Merb as a great experimentation playground for exploring web framework functionality while learning a great many things from Rails and building a fresh view based on Rails strengths and weaknesses.

There is no reason that a lot of the goodness in Merb cannot be applied back to Rails, but it is no small feat to trim down rails size without breaking backwards compatibility.

I view it like this, more choices make the Ruby ecosystem a better place. So let’s just stop with the Rails VS Merb stuff. How about people choose what framework they want to use based on the frameworks merits and features rather then religious arguments about how my framework can beat up your framework.

The Ruby community in general has been exceedingly nice as long as I have been a part of it. I wrote Merb for a reason, if Merb’s philosophies agree with your tastes then great, use Merb. If Rails is your thing then that’s great too! We do not need a monoculture.

Rails has been Ruby’s killer app and has brought Ruby to the masses. But Ruby is growing up, there are many alternate Ruby implementations now and they all work together for the common good of Ruby.

I’d like the same thing to happen with Rails, Merb and all the other ruby web frameworks. Let’s all work together to make the Ruby ecosystem stronger. We do not need to fight amongst ourselves when there are plenty of other Programming language communities to fight with :P

I guess what I am saying is that I see the proliferation of ruby web frameworks as a sign that Ruby itself has “arrived” and is here to stay. So can’t we all just get along in Ruby web framework land?

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A few cool developments

Posted by ezmobius Sat, 17 May 2008 23:29:00 GMT

My Deploying Rails Applications Book has shipped in print form! This book has been two years in the making and was rewritten a few times as the Rails deployment landscape shifted. I’m so glad it is finally in print \m/ Big thanks to all my co-authors and beta readers who gave valuable early feedback.

And in other amazingly beautiful news, Rails runs on Rubinius as of last night!. A huge round of applause for Evan, Wilson, Brian, Ryan, Eric and Eero, the rubinius core team and also to all 150 rubinius contributors. This is a huge milestone for the project. Being able to run rails, which is one of the largest and most complex ruby programs out there is huge. This means that rubinius is now ruby compatible for the most part. Now the team can start to steer their focus on speed improvements like JIT , polymorphic inline caching, LLVM and various other techniques for making rbx smoking fast.

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Cool visualization of merb's framework load process

Posted by ezmobius Thu, 08 May 2008 04:51:00 GMT

Michael Klishin made a sweet mapping of a merb server’s boot process. Hopefully we can get stuff like this made for other parts of the framework as well as I think it can really help you find your way around the source code of merb-core.

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Merb-0.9.3 released

Posted by ezmobius Mon, 05 May 2008 02:36:00 GMT

Merb 0.9.3 is mostly (but not only) a bugfix release. We’ve not only added several features very useful for developers who want to use Merb for web services, but fixed many bugs, greatly improved spec coverage and quality, made documentation better, and did some performance-related work.

diffstat shows 95 files changed, 3359 insertions(+), 837 deletions(-)

Read more...

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Engine Yard needs Erlang Programmers

Posted by ezmobius Thu, 01 May 2008 23:26:00 GMT

Engine Yard is looking for one or two kick ass Erlang programmers to help work on our next generation cloud computing platform. Knowledge of ruby/xmpp/ejabberd/linux is a plus.

If you think you fit the bill then please email me directly at ezra@engineyard.com.

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