Merb, this isn't your dad's framework!

I found a pretty cool ORM for ruby a little while ago call datamapper. It looks pretty good and I would love to try it. Unfortunately, if you are using Rails it's pretty hard to use something besides ActiveRecord. In fact, Rail's is pretty tightly coupled and it's pretty hard to use anything but the default gems.

This led me to a framework called Merb. I pointed one of my friends in the direction of Merb and he also blogged about it. Merb is basically a MVC framework for ruby developers that prefers to use gems to add functionality then one monolithic framework. For example, you are allowed to use any of several ORMs for your project. Or templating engines. Merb is also smaller and faster than Rails. That alone is reason enough for me to check it out.

But, there are some downsides. Merb is still very young. It's not even at a 1.0 stage yet. But this post does give me some hope. Also, there isn't a lot of documentation on it yet. Still, there seems to be a lot of promise there.

Personally, I would love to try a combination of Merb, datamapper and DRYML. It would be great to throw DRYML at a good web developer and let them go to town while your ruby developers focus on creating a tight backend with datamapper. There is still an issue with routes but I'll blog about that later.