Merb/Rails Merge Talk by Foy Savas

Foy Savas gave a talk today at the boston.rb meeting about the upcoming merger. I was taking notes in my igoogle blogger gadget, but after his talk, and before I saved the draft, the page refreshed and I lost what I was doing. Here is my sparse recollection of what he said.

Right now, they are still ironing stuff out. A lot of stuff. The progress is here: http://github.com/wycats/rails/tree/master

He described his background as being a Rails developer, then a Merb developer, and now he's becoming a Rails developer again.

If you're using Rails, keep using Rails, if you're using Merb, keep using Merb.

Rails will benefit from some modularity that is present in Merb. Foy compared Rails to Lego, and Merb to Duplo. The stack will be easier to take apart and substitute one part for another. The defaults seem like they will favor some of the Rails stuff, but a lot of that will be replaced or heavily worked over. In any case, Everyone will have more options.

A Merb "slice" might be called a Ruby "engine".

The new router will be sexy. Other things I can't remember will be sexy.

There will be a new ORM which I think he called Active ORM.

His book, The Merb Way, is still going to come out. And he's already anticipating a sequel. He didn't get into specifics of what had to change due to the merger.

Foy asks: "What will Merb mean in the future? Agnosticism and Modularity." So apparently it will apply to concepts rather than actual software?

In any case, he said that by RubyConf... or was it RailsConf... he would have something more definitive to discuss.

There is a lot that is still up in the air with the merger, and Foy made it clear that he has a predilection to push back releases.

Also, apparently, Foy lives in the South end, and likes it quite well. He pretty much called it the Merb of Boston, due to it's awesomeness and the fact that "the tracks don't go there." Rails, tracks... get it?!

In a related note, Foy did not announce any plans by the merger team to make the South End T accessible.