A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post noting that I liked the lightweight nature of the Ruby web framework Merb. Today comes the news that Merb and Rails will be merging in Rails 3. People who see Merb as the "anti-Rails" seem to find this surprising. But people who see Merb as "Rails done right/better" are enthusiastic about it. It's hard to blame the developers for being more interested in pleasing the latter group. When you read through the list of "What Does That Mean, Exactly?" at this link, I...

I came across this interview with Yehuda Katz about Merb, an interesting web framework for Ruby.  Although I have less actual experience with Merb than with Rails, I've always liked the general design philosophy of Merb. Whereas Rails appears to be designed as a complete MVC framework (and a nice one, too; I'm not writing this post to critique Rails), Merb allows you to build your own framework by combining existing tools. It doesn't try and reinvent a new ORM or package manager, for example. Li...