December 23rd 2008 By Ezra Zygmuntowicz

Merb is Rails

Wow this has been a hectic, emotional week. The Rails and Merb core teams have been silently working together towards this monumental announcement. The announcement is that Merb is Rails and Rails is Merb.

Merb and Rails are joining forces and merging the two code bases for Rails-3.0. We’re targeting RailsConf for the first cut of this magic.

When I first started merb way back in the day it was just a fun little project to hack on. But it became more serious as I explored the options. I always considered merb-core a clean room rewrite of ActionPack and I think this tended to upset some people who were very attached to rails.

Fast forward to current day and Merb-1.0 has been out for a while and there is a whole brouhaha of Rails VS Merb memes on the twitters and blogs. This has to stop as it is tearing apart the community and is very non productive.

So our two teams started talking to see if we could put our differences aside and come together for the common good. We’ve laid out a roadmap of what and how to integrate merb’s best features into rails-3.0. I think we have a great plan that will make Rails the best framework in existence. It will be a blend of the best things we have discovered while working on merb, while keeping the Rails aesthetic people have grown to love.

You can expect to get a kick ass, fast, memory efficient version of rails(merb) this spring!

Merb folks will not be left out in the cold. We will continue to support bug and security fixes for the merb 1.0.x line. And we will provide a clear upgrade path to Rails 3.0 for merb apps. We still have quite a few merb apps running internally at ey and will want an upgrade path for our own apps as well.

This is going to be a lot of work for everyone involved but in the end I think this may just be the most inspiring open source story in history.

I’m so impressed with everyone involved. All the core team members from both sides have been able to put away the weapons and egos and really come together, committed to making this transition work seamlessly.

2009 is going to be a seriously strong year for the ruby community. With everyone working together, we have such a kick ass team of smart people that this whole framework thing is going to be a solved issue.

Merb is dead, long live Merb(Rails-3.0)!

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