Rails and Merb Bury the Hatchet

One of the most persistent memes of the Rails world - that the Rails and Merb teams are locked in a titanic battle for the mindshare of developers using Ruby web frameworks - died abruptly today, in the aftermath of simultaneous announcements from the Rails and Merb teams. We now know that Rails 3.0 is aiming to have a beta version out next May - and that software will simultaneously be Merb 2.0. Yes, that's right: Rails and Merb are officially merging.

Though there are plenty of details that will need to be worked out while the actual work is being done, some of the major pieces of Rails 3.0 are fairly clear:

• Support for component agnosticism and running with less than a full stack
• Performance optimizations ported from existing Merb code
• Documented public API for plugins to use
• Support for ORMs other than Active Record
• Migration paths for both existing Rails and existing Merb applications

While a number of people wondered publicly whether April 1st had suddenly arrived, the early reaction across blogs, Twitter, and IRC appears to be broadly positive. Congratulations to the Rails and Merb teams for taking this important (and unexpected!) step. I look forward to a truly amazing Rails 3.0 as a result.

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