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?

The Zend Framework, a popular open-source Web application framework sponsored by PHP company Zend, just released version 1.6, and it contains a large number of new features. So writes Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans on his blog last week, on the occasion of the release being made available. The most important features associated with this release are the integration of the Dojo framework for JavaScript, better support for automatic testing, and better support for SOAP.

Apache fans in the Ruby community were delighted several months ago, when Phusion released Passenger, an Apache module for deploying Rails applications. I have been working with Passenger over the last few weeks, and am pleased to report that the module is extremely easy to install, use, and configure. Passenger has succeeded in bringing me back into the world of Apache after several years of wandering in the HTTP server desert.