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Merb to merge into Rails


By Alex Handy
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January 14, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Yehuda Katz spent an entire year screaming about Ruby-on-Rails' mailer framework. In the end, he decided to simply build his own runtime and framework to replace Rails. That open-source framework came to be known as Merb.

But the Rails team didn’t ignore Katz. He and some of his fellow Merbivores, in fact, have been asked to refactor Rails in Merb's image.

The entire affair began as a rather heated argument, said Katz. “Two weeks before the merge, there was a pretty visible spat between the Rails and Merb teams. It ended reasonably well. Everybody agreed to Kumbaya a little. It had been the culmination of a cold war scenario,” said Katz.

Yehuda Katz, creator of Merb
Yehuda Katz, Merb lead developer and Rails core team member
That battle was over benchmarks and other areas where the Merb faithful said their framework was better than Rails. Another of those areas was modularity, said Katz

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby-on-Rails framework, has written extensively on his blog about the changes Rails 3.0 will undergo. On the topic of merging Merb into Rails, he wrote, “I've been working on Rails for more than five years. Obviously I've poured much of my soul, talent and dedication into this ... The cultural impact of what is good [about] Rails has spread far and wide and touched lots of programmers.

"These programmers share a similar weltanschauung [world view], but they don't need to care only about the things that I care about. In fact, the system works much better if they care about different things than I do."

When the dust settled, Katz, Lori Holden and Carl Lerche began working on Rails full time, while the rest of the Merb team all turned into Rails contributors. Katz forked the project on GitHub and began the heavy task of refactoring.

“One way of doing this would be to completely ice the existing Rails codebase and try to rebuild the features from the ground up,” said Katz. “But there's so much existing quirkiness that as you start to look at it,” it's not really a good option, said Katz. “The alternative is to go through Rails and do massive refactoring. I went through all the code in a render pass and it’s not really recognizable as the old code.”


Related Search Term(s): Merb, Rails, server management

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Comments


01/19/2009 03:57:52 PM EST

WOW!! You both moved into the Obama culture. You must have been Obamaized unknowingly. You have decided that you both have the same interests just different approaches, makes more sense to work together to accomplish twice as much, at twice the speed with twice the quality. Amazing Obama (the Messiah) walks on water to strike again!! Keep up the nonpartisan work and you will challenge the SUN Gods.

United StatesJ Merrick


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