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Merb 1.0 offers an alternative to Ruby on Rails


By Alex Handy
October 14, 2008 — 
In response to the Merbivores railing against Rails, the first release candidate for Merb 1.0 was released, and it's squarely targeted at developers who want Ruby but find Rails frustrating. The release came yesterday at Merb Camp in San Diego.

Ruby on Rails has long been praised for its no-nonsense, straightforward Web development model. The Merb framework attacks the problems that have appeared as Rails became popular, such as its limited database connectivity and slow restart times. Eighty percent of developers, so the reasoning goes, need to build database driven Web applications; Ruby on Rails can make that easy and fast. For the remaining 20%, however, Rails can feel like handcuffs.

Yehuda Katz is the maintainer of the Merb project. “Most people do the same thing, and having everyone start from scratch and do millions of lines of config is not worth it,” said Katz. “Usually, if you were out of the 80/20 rule, Rails was frustrating.



“Merb 1.0 aims to be roughly as easy as Rails to get up and running,” said Katz. “Because of a lot of the assumptions in Rails about how databases work, you're very limited in what you can use. Because Merb doesn't make a lot of assumptions, it was very easy to add an adapter to Salesforce. If you're connecting to a Web service with Merb, it's easy to  write a good integration without running afoul of assumptions in the framework.”

The differences between Merb and Rails don't end there. Katz said that this first release candidate of Merb 1.0 includes a lot of improvements made to the server runtime.

“Rails has notorious complexity on the server deployment. But once Merb gets on the server, it's easier to control. It's much easier to restart without having downtime. We had to get into the guts of how server operating systems work, which is something Rails rightly avoided. With restarting a Rails server, you can have 30 seconds to a minute of downtime. With Merb you have almost no downtime.

“A lot of people say Rails doesn't scale, and that's not really true. But unlike PHP or Java, Rails is only recently multithreaded. Ruby also has a poor threading model. One of the main purposes was to make sure Merb scales more efficiently. When you have a bunch of Merb workers serving Web requests, a lot of the memory they're using is the same. It doesn't change in each version or in each worker. There are ways you can get the OS to share memory between those workers. We actually built this into Merb."

The project is based at www.merbivore.com.


Related Search Term(s): Ruby, software development, Merb, Rails


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