The most effective martial artists specialize in their discipline, but are not afraid to cross-train in others. Bruce Lee—arguably the most famous and influential martial artist of the past century—trained first in Tai Chi Chuan, then Gung Fu, and boxing, as well as learning western fencing. The insight taken from so many disciplines led him to create the Jeet Kune Do form of combat.
Programmers are not all that different. Cross-training in other languages and frameworks can only improve one’s overall mastery of the craft. When it comes to Ruby frameworks, the two most popular choices are Ruby on Rails and Merb. They’re often seen as being contenders, but this truly isn’t a zero-sum game; learning both is a very sensible move. They both enable you to write web applications in Ruby, and are somewhat similar, so learning one after you know the other shouldn’t be very challenging. In the many cases people learn Merb after they’ve had some experience with Rails, but either way, acquiring a solid grasp of both frameworks provides developers with extra flexibility. Often people who learn both, will end up mostly just using one or another, depending on their individual preferences. But it’s worth knowing them so as to be able to write both CRUD-style applications that fall within Rails’ solution space, and more complex, edge cases where Rails’ opinions will end up contending with yours.
Among the reasons to give Merb a chance, is its focus on performance, a smaller memory footprint and an extreme level of modularity, which enables you to pick and choose which components you’d like to use.
Merb is not as mature as Rails, of course, but it has reached version 1.0.x and with it developers can have greater confidence in a more stabilized API. Now is perhaps the best moment to get involved and learn more about this rising framework. Not surprisingly though, Merb finds itself in a similar spot to the one that Rails was in a couple of years ago (in terms of weakness of documentation when it comes to getting started). Thankfully, this point is being taken seriously and there’s been some major progress in terms of improving the documentation for Merb. Below are some useful links to get you started with Merb.
Merb has an official API documentation, a wiki, a google group, and a community site called Merbunity for news, projects and tutorials. The irc.freenode.net #merb channel is also a useful and welcoming spot. Furthermore, there is a Peepcode PDF draft called Meet Merb. If you want something even more substantial, on the book front there are several titles coming out in the near future. These include Merb in Action, The Merb Way, Beginning Merb and Merb: What You Need To Know. There is also an open source Merb book, whose development is led by Matt Aimonetti. It’s a work in progress, but probably a very good starting point, which just happens to have the added bonus of being free. And if your interested in Merb, don’t miss InfoQ’s interview with Yehuda Katz, who’s Merb’s lead developer and one of the sharpest guys we have in the Ruby community.
Finally, if you are a professional developer who wants to quickly progress with Merb and bring their skills to the next level, do not miss your chance to attend a three day intensive course on Merb, which is being offered by Yehuda and Matt in Phoenix, AZ between January 19 and 21 (2009). Registration has been open for two days already and 20 out of the 30 available spots have already been snapped up. The remaining seats won’t last more than a day or two, so if you are interested, don’t delay (sign up now and you’ll also benefit from an early registration price).
2009 is almost here, so why not take the opportunity to learn Merb this year?
Leave a Reply