[ANN] Merb-0.4.0

[Ezra Zygmuntowicz]

Hello Friends-

Just a quick note to announce the release of Merb-0.4.0. this is a
significant release for the project and has way too many features and
changes to list here.

You can read about the new changes here on my blog:

http://brainspl.at/articles/2007/11/07/merb-0-4-0-released-with-new-site-merbivore-com

And we have launched a new website as well:

http://merbivore.org

our trac instance is here:

http://merb.devjavu.com

IRC channel on irc.freenode.net:

#merb

Merb is an ORM agnostic web framework. Its the VC layer of MVC. There
is official plugin support for using ActiveRecord, DataMapper or
Sequel as your ORM or you can use merb with no ORM if you want to use
a file store or CouchDB or something like that.

Merb is written with the motto of less magick in the code and clean
modular entry points to extend the framework for your own purposes.
Plugins are just rubygems so they support versioning and dependencies.
We've taken a lot of the good things we like from rails and left
behind a lot of the cruft and baggage we didn't need or want. This
means merb is lean and mean and the code is easy to grok.

Cheers-
- Ezra Zygmuntowicz & The Merb Team

 

[S.D]

Hello Friends-


Merb is an ORM agnostic web framework. Its the VC layer of MVC. There
is official plugin support for using ActiveRecord, DataMapper or
Sequel as your ORM or you can use merb with no ORM if you want to use
a file store or CouchDB or something like that.

Merb is written with the motto of less magick in the code and clean
modular entry points to extend the framework for your own purposes.
Plugins are just rubygems so they support versioning and dependencies.
We've taken a lot of the good things we like from rails and left
behind a lot of the cruft and baggage we didn't need or want. This
means merb is lean and mean and the code is easy to grok.

Cheers-
- Ezra Zygmuntowicz & The Merb Team

What is the best approach for converting a web app that is using Mongrel
to one that utilizes Merb?

Do I rebuild everything from scratch, or is there an example of
converting an application to Merb that would wrap an existing
mongrel/rails app in the Merb framework?

If I rebuild, is there an order I should follow when merging the models,
controllers, and views that I already have with the ones created by Merb.

Thanks in advance for your informed advice.

-- Steve Downie

 

[Roger Pack]

does merbe run 'super well' on 1.9? Like nicely fast?

 

[Daniel DeLorme]

does merbe run 'super well' on 1.9? Like nicely fast?

Do you think you could come up with a page showing how Merb is different
from Rails? IMHO every non-rails framework should do that. The large
community makes Rails the default framework; why use Merb if it's the
same as Rails but with less people improving and testing it? So the
deciding factor on choosing Merb over Rails would have to be
1) what can Merb do that Rails doesn't?
2) what does Merb do differently?

Daniel

 

[Ezra Zygmuntowicz]

Do you think you could come up with a page showing how Merb is
different from Rails? IMHO every non-rails framework should do that.
The large community makes Rails the default framework; why use Merb
if it's the same as Rails but with less people improving and testing
it? So the deciding factor on choosing Merb over Rails would have to
be
1) what can Merb do that Rails doesn't?
2) what does Merb do differently?

Daniel

Merb borrows quite a bit of conventions from rails but also has it's
own interesting features. One of the main goals of the project is to
have a small, tight easily extensible core that is fast and has clean
explicit entry points for plugins and customizations. It's a lot more
modular than rails is as far officially supporting 3 different ORM
backends, activerecord, sequel and datamapper, supporting test/unit or
rspec for testing.

Merb does not use the stdlib cgi.rb, it implements all its own
multipart parsing and is much faster at it. In fact merb is much
faster then rails in general:

http://pastie.caboo.se/private/dbwggdztupcpbt6v3rdpga

Hhere is a pdf called Why Merb? It covers a lot of the points where
merb is different from rails.

http://yehudakatz.com/wp-content/uploads/WhyMerb.pdf

Cheers-
-Ezra

 

[Jeremy Kemper]

In fact merb is much faster then rails in general:

http://pastie.caboo.se/private/dbwggdztupcpbt6v3rdpga

This is a microbenchmark of partial render speed, not a general look
at application performance.

Check out the apps at
merb http://svn.devjavu.com/merb/apps/benchmark/
rails http://svn.devjavu.com/merb/apps/rails_benchmark/

It'd be cool to see camping, iowa, wee, nitro, etc versions as well,
though perhaps of jruby's petstore app instead.

Best,
jeremy

 

[Ezra Zygmuntowicz]

This is a microbenchmark of partial render speed, not a general look
at application performance.

Check out the apps at
merb http://svn.devjavu.com/merb/apps/benchmark/
rails http://svn.devjavu.com/merb/apps/rails_benchmark/

It'd be cool to see camping, iowa, wee, nitro, etc versions as well,
though perhaps of jruby's petstore app instead.

Best,
jeremy

Yeah it is a micro benchmark but will include more and more features
as time progresses. We will probably port the petstore app people are
using for benchmarks and run with that.

I also have to say that edge rails has some major performance
improvements over the older gems so kudos to rails core for that. If
rails didn't have to support so much baggage in the form of backwards
compatibility then they could be just as fast imho.

I though that rails 2.0 would be the chance to break some backwards
compat in the name of faster and leaner framework but alas the ship
has sailed on that one. Maybe rails 3.0 can actually make some
dramatic changes? I'd be happy to contribute anything I've learned in
merb back to rails if you feel like re-architecting ActionPack.


Cheers-
-Ezra