Why Merb is delicious

Written on 8:49:00 AM by S. Potter

Below are the reasons why Merb is more delicious than other MVC web frameworks I have worked with (including Rails):

• On a diet...It is lighter weight than most, but still has enough oomph to implement common features with minimal code
• Religion-free...It is ORM, JavaScript/AJAX and testing/speccing library agnostic.
• The sum of it's parts...OK that was a lame segway, but parts is a mightily useful feature where a plugin is just total overkill. Just because Java calls something a "component" does not make it the general definition of a component in concept. And now look at the Rails plugin debacle today.
• Precious gems...Plugins are created, distributed and installed in the form of beautiful RubyGems as opposed to the Rails plugin catastrophe with Gigabytes of duplicate disk space and lame version/revision control
• It's exceptional...Merb actually thought about how to do exception handling in controllers before Rails came up with something and also came up with IMHO a better solution.
• Speedy Gonzalez...Compared to especially Rails, Merb performs very nicely indeed.
• Loose threads...Merb is thread-safe unlike Rails, so that means one process can handle multiple concurrent file uploads, where Rails cannot right now.

All together I think most people will find Merb to be a much better thought out (conceptually) MVC framework than Rails. Over the next few weeks I'll be talking a lot about Merb and it's delicious APIs, Plugins, etc. as it nears it's 1.0 release.

Posted in merb, rails, ruby

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