I wasn't exactly thrilled by this announcement. To be honest if feels like EngineYard is preparing for tough times by spinning off/cutting back all the open source projects they've been sponsoring (thanks by the way). While getting merb into rails is a good thing, merging the two is going to be a long road of compromises filled with heartbreak for people who saw merb as "rails done right". Rails, while wonderful and pioneering, was designed and written by php and java refugees who were learning the language as they went. Rails source code seems convoluted and dare I say ugly when compared to merb and the organization of files just confusing. Merb to me was rails with 20/20 hindsight.
Just looking at these two side by side in a browser gives me serious pause. http://github.com/wycats/merb/tree/master http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master I'm sorry if I come off as a negative naysayer but it just feels like an independent film director whose work I respected finally got the recognition he/she deserved but as a result signed on to direct Rocky 8. At the application level I think the disruption will be minimal for newer projects since we're talking about the same MVC philosophy and everything being ruby. I see big wins all around for rails but what's in it for the merb community? Bigger community? Merb already had the cream of the crop and we all saw how badly the signal to noise ratio degenerated as the influx of developers increased. Merb was like the study hall of a big city public school where the smart kids hung out and bettered their minds rather than chase girls and popularity. Better documentation? Maybe but the lack of solid documentation for merb encouraged many to look under the hood and discover clean and concise source code. Plus, if you argued that "specs are the docs" merb is in some ways much better documented than rails at the source level. Wider industry adoption? Yellowpages.com and a bunch of other established rails sites migrated to merb and it's only a time before any best kept secret stays kept. There was enough adoption of merb to sustain developer interest in keeping the framework moving forward. This all comes as a shock just as I thought things were settling down with merb 1.0.x. Sam PS I use rails at work and merb at home. I don't have anything personal against rails. Just sad to lose a choice. My bet is merb will eventually resurrect itself sometime before or after Rails 3.0. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "merb" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/merb?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
