merbday shirts are now collectors items…
December 24th, 2008 tkadom
I guess its good that the merb and rails team held off on this announcement until yesterday. Had they done it sooner, we might not have had anyone show up for merbday! I will take solace in the fact that the merbday shirt I now own is a collectors item. I almost wish we had put a merb 1.0 version number on the shirt as well just to illustrate the point that we saw the goodness and we were there!
I have somewhat mixed emotions about the merger. Right now, everyone is putting a happy face on the event and wishing the best for Rails 3. I understand the motivation to address the fragmentation in the ruby community. I certainly think that adding the talent from the merb team to the rails team will make rails a stronger framework, and I also am very hopeful that the architectural principles set forth in merb make it into rails. The merger could be good for the ruby community in the long term.
Hopefully, Yehuda and company have worked out an agreement with the Rails team on who owns what, and how the architectural decisions will ultimately be decided. It would probably serve the two teams well to divide areas of responsibility right away so that no egos are bruised along the way. When i heard about the announcement in IRC yesterday, I envisioned merb-core being adopted by rails, and rails being built on top of that in a merb-more manner. All the goodness of merb with all the goodness of rails and none of the baggage if you dont want it.
Reading DHH’s announcement, this does not seem to be the route the team has decided to take. It appears that merb performance enhancements will be backported to rails where possible. Merb design principles will also be applied to the rails framework, but I think it was made pretty clear that this was not a rewrite of rails but rather a performance tune and refactor.
The pessimist in me wonders how the rails team will feel about architectural disagreements with the merb team once all the merb goodness has been assimilated. I am hopeful that the best parts of merb and rails will show up in rails 3, and that the teams have already defined their respective architectural responsibilities to mitigate the number of heated debates that are certainly in their future. I would rather see rails three make everyone in both the rails and merb communities smile, than to see a concerted effort to revive merb as an independent framework after rails 3 peeks out from under the covers at railsconf 2009.
Tim
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