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.

Looking forward to seeing what you have to say on merb. I've been doing more and more projects in merb and really love the freedoms it enables.