| Not to cry sour grapes here but there is not one mention of Merb in that entire blog post. I personally wrote merb in order to show that rails internals could be much better, modular and faster. I did heavy duty politicking to get the two teams to come together and I think the rails merb merger is one of the coolest open source success stories vie heard of. But not a single mention of merb in this entire post. I'm not complaining but it seems disingenuous not to mention it as the sole reason I wrote merb was to push rails forward. And when it looked like merb might possibly overtake rails I went ahead and gave merb to the rails project and got the two teams together so there wasn't wasted effort. After all to have ruby and rails itself win we needed to compete with java and python and php. Merb was starting to fragment the ruby community as it became a more and more viable option and I did some personal heavy politicking to get it merged back into rails so we could take on the world instead of infighting within the ruby community. I think it's been a great success story and most of the ideas of merb's architecture have made it into rails. So I'm incredibly happy to see rails 3 finally come out. And I'm incredibly happy that my little experiment in making rails architecture better has paid off and the two projects merged. But I do think it's a bit weak that merb was not mentioned once in the article. (Edit) all this being said I don't want to come across as co plaining. My work on merb ended up exactly as I wanted it to, it made rails better. So huge congratulations to the rails team for making this happen! (Edit) http://rubyonrails.org/merb |
First of all, this is a huge milestone for Rails. From my perspective, this work is three or four years in the making, from the beginning of the Merb efforts, through the merge, and on until the final release of Rails 3.
From a personal perspective, this release is huge closure for me; I feel like I’ve been working on Rails 3 (and associated projects, like Thor and Bundler) for years.
When the Merb team merged into the Rails team, we very quickly got to work. The previous animosity actually melted away rather quickly, to be replaced with the somewhat tense, but productive give and take of a core team.
One of the really amazing things to come out of the last couple of years is a whole slew of new committers to Rails (in addition to Carl and me): José Valim, Aaron Patterson, Xavier Noria and Santiago Pastorino. Rails 3 would still be limping along if not for these guys, who really went above and beyond the call of duty in the past few months to get things past the finish line.
In light of all this, I really haven’t thought much about the old Merb/Rails party lines in a while. I’ve been too focused on Rails and Bundler, and the rest of the core team (old and new alike) have been busy helping.