More Merb at MerbCamp
Posted by geetarista October 13, 2008
I spent this weekend in San Diego to attend MerbCamp, a conference dedicated entirely to the Merb framework. I have been so happy with the time I have spent learning Ruby and Rails, but learning more about Merb this weekend literally made me giddy. I started looking at Merb a little while ago, but I didn’t do much with it since it was constantly changing and I did not want to adjust to the overhauls that were occurring. I wanted to wait until it was more stable before I gave it a shot. Since the first release candidate of Merb is almost out, I thought now was the time to get my feet wet.
To me, the most important difference or advantage for Merb so far has been the philosophy. Rails (DHH) is very opinionated, which is great, but it does not allow flexibility when you need to do something that Rails does not support. Merb on the other hand has been built from the ground up with the opinion that the developer should have the freedom to mold the framework to their needs, if necessary. Merb is framework and library agnostic, so wanting or needing to use jQuery or DataMapper for your application isn’t a pain at all. In fact, it’s ideal. There is so much more to Merb that just makes sense to me as a developer.
Although Rails will still be in the picture, I am looking forward to using Merb much more often and maybe even completely replacing Rails some time in the future.
