litany against fear

coding with spice ¤ by nick quaranto

Battle Royale: Merb's Role in the MVC Holy Wars Notes

published 19 Nov 2008

Part of my series of notes from the Professional Ruby Conference. See them all here.

This talk is from Foy Savas. He’s a Ruby Application Developer and a contributor to Merb and DataMapper Just for Foy:

Dan, you better pay up.

The list of web frameworks goes on and on! It’s important to keep an open mind. Merb has influnces from Django/Pylons from Python. It’s meant to do what Rails is bad at: quick responses. What is it now? High performance, quick to deployment, fully scalable.

We can make analogies between the frameworks.

Application performance: Looking a graph of how the frameworks stack up for requests per second. Fastest is merb routing, faster is merb controller, merb itself handles rendering pages. Rails and Merb eat cake for breakfast…but merb blazes ahead! How? Uses Ruby, Picks the best, tests for speed. No Symbol#to_proc, considered evil. Merb saves big with design decisions. Merb inline templates into controller as methods! No copying like Rails does. Merb is committed to performance: future releases can’t be slower.

Abstract controller: exception, mail controllers. No double renders. Merb uses case statements instead of responds_to. Merb has a worker queue baked in with run_later! Pushes it out of the request, response cyce. Merb is Rack-enabled. Super easy. Magical stuff is possible with Rack middleware and multiple versions of Merb. ActiveSupport is a kitchen sink. Extlib isn’t. Only what you need, nothing you don’t. Matz loves the Merb too.

DataMapper kicks AR’s ass. Auto-migrations, identity map, lazy loading data sets. Rails loves alias_method_chain. Merb hates it and would rather just refactor. The Merb API public method interfaces doesn’t change without timed deprecation. Private methods aren’t supposed to be used so they can factor. Plugins are gems!

Merb Slices: Rails engines and an official part of the app. Extract code from your app and use it on others. Merb Auth: RESTful authentication that uses the cascading strategy pattern. And more. So much more.

Tons of Rails production examples. Not so much Merb. But they should be counted as Ruby apps.

Marketability! They’re looking to get real with Rails. Looking for smart people no matter what. Gotta respect the leaders of the community.

What’s the Merb Advantage? Gems. Modularity. Performance. Stack agnosticism. Open-Endedness.