I recently heard some whispers that Rails and Merb are going to be merged and the result should be call “Rails 3”. I simply couldn’t believe it–at least until the bombshell dropped on blogs and on twitter.
Enough has been written on what this is all about so I won’t duplicate it here–just my 2 cents.
Overall, I think this is a huge thing for the ruby community. I always had an eye on Merb and considered it more than once for a new project. Main reason: Performance. However, I never made the move. So I’m happy to see that all the corner stones of Merb are going to hit Rails’ code base soon. Besides the performance stuff, I’m looking forward to have a stable API for plugins. This should make it a lot easier and less work to maintain plugins for Rails.
To quote David:
Rails 3 is going to kick ass.
I am still not sure how it will turn out. I really liked the merb community the way it was and I’ll be sad if it goes away.
I guess in the long term, if merb and Rails manage to merge in a way that takes the best of both worlds (and, hey, why not call it Merb 2.0 then? heh) it does make sense and was inevitable, but, my, if I am not feeling a bit dissapointed.
There’s nothing more to say than good luck to everyone, wether they’re Rails guys, merb guys or somewhere in between – I hope the transition works out well for everyone.