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Merb Aims to Give Ruby Developers More Choice

Engine Yard, which specializes in cloud computing and open source tools for Ruby and Rails applications, has announced a new open source framework called Merb. "Ruby continues to be one of the fastest growing programming languages in terms of adoption," said Ezra Zygmuntowicz, founder of the Merb project and co-founder of Engine Yard. "Merb offers Ruby programmers another choice for building Ruby applications." What's unique about it?

According to Engine Yard, the "Merb Stack" is a key differentiator compared to other choices for building Ruby applications. Aimed out-of-the-box deployment, the company claims that it lets developers start building on a stack without having to cobble a stack together on their own. Groups of Merb processes can also share memory and run in parallel. "This produces more efficient handling of multiple requests over short periods of time and better control over groups of Merb processes," says Engine Yard's announcement.

There is a full list of features in Merb 1.0 here. It is designed to make extensive use of plug-ins, and Merb is an MVC (model-view-controller) framework, so it avoids a monolithic core in favor of extensibility through plug-ins. On this page, you can find out more about what's under the hood.

You can download Merb 1.0 preview version here (the final version is expected at the end of the month), and there is a Google Group here where help is available. Ruby is one of the fastest growing development languages, so it's not surprising to see more options for building applications. As eWeek suggests Ruby is one of several environments that could start to grow even faster during the economic crisis. You can find many open source projects based on Rails here.

• ruby on rails
• Engine Yard
• Merb

by Angela Walsch on Jul. 17, 2009

Musings about Technology, Software Design and Development

10 Alternative Ruby Web Frameworks

Do you want to write web applications but don't want to use Ruby on Rails? We all know Ruby on Rails is the most popular web framework for Ruby on the planet. Rails is the reason Ruby is so popular today, Rails is Ruby's killer application. I am very much in favor of using Rails but there may be times when a smaller or different framework is desired or just for the sake of choices. We also know once something becomes popular, it is duplicated, imitated or downright recreated. I started thinking about this recently from a series of posts on the Ruby Talk group on Google. Someone on the list wanted to create a web site utilizing Ruby but didn't want to use Rails. It is a fair question and I knew of a couple but wanted to dig deeper to see how many frameworks were springing up. I am not claiming any expertise with these frameworks, I have used some to try to understand how they work and possible applications for smaller projects. Some I was not aware of until making this list. I am doing this as a reference for fellow Ruby developers who are looking for alternative web application frameworks.

Merb

This is probably the most popular of the alternative frameworks, primarily because it has been around for a while and gets good coverage in the forums and was started by popular Rubyist, Ezra Zygmuntowicz. I have started playing with this framework for a couple applications I am creating. The documentation is very good but there doesn't seem to be any good tutorials yet. I can expect the lack of tutorials being a new framework. There is a nice overview of Merb for the site I write for, InfoQ, called High cute rain boots

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