In a bit of surprise news, Rails merges with the Merb team.

The implication will be that the efforts of the two frameworks won’t be duplicated across the teams. Users of merb will be able to enjoy the third-party support that Rails enjoys – for example Rails is bundled with the latest Mac OS X, and Eclipse has the awesome RadRails.

My previous reservations re: RoR may now be fast disappearing. Look for future blog post that re-evaluates the position.

I’ve been looking through Ruby on Rails and I find many of the conventions fascinating. Convention-over-configuration is cool one … it means instead of having to tirelessly configure every single aspect of your application … RoR does some things automagically, provided you name things correctly. This cuts down on the amount of time spent tinkering with configuration (editing large XML files, a la Hibernate) and more time actually dealing with the problem at hand.

But what is perhaps RoR’s greatest strength is also likely to be it’s greatest weakness. Although you can get apps up and running very fast with a framework like RoR, you may find yourself tied to a certain way of thinking – because the framework was prescriptive like that.

And now Merb comes along. Although it’s not got as big a user base as RoR, Merb seems to have a lot of good potential. Losing some of the “automagical” convention-over-configuration pixie dust has its downsides, but the upside is that Merb seems to be a lot more flexible and lightweight, and less prescriptive. We shall see the results of these new experiments …