looking at merb

I've been spending a litte time getting acquainted with merb. Last night, I gave a quick highlevel overview of merb at our local Tech Vally Ruby Brigade. I've used my merb time to also get acquainted with two other gems that I've had my eyes on for a few months; HAML and DataMapper.

After the quick merb overview presentation, we then merb'd up a 'hello world', using DataMapper, Erubis and for fun a little HAML.

Some merb bullet points from the presentation:

• Speed
• Favors speed over magic.

• Lightweight
• small, concise code base - no code is the fastest code
• prefer plugins (gems) over bloated core
  

• Powerful
• multi-threaded
• very extensible (orm, template engine, test framework, javascript framework, etc.)
  

• ORM Agnostic
  
• Ships with support for Active Record, Data Mapper, Sequel, but really any ORM can be used.
  

• Template Agnostic
• Ships with support for Erubius, Markaby, Haml, etc
  

• JavaScript Library Agnostic
• Feel free to use Jquery, Prototype/ Scriptaculous, MooTools, etc.
• merb uses a slick require_js/include_required_js combination
  

• Test agnostict
• Rspec, Test::Unit, test/spec etc.
  

• Targeted Generators
• You tell Merb what ORM, and Testing, you are using and the generators build the respective code

• Provides API (instead of Rails responds_to)
• provides :xml, :js, :yaml

• Custom HTTP Exceptions
• All the standard http error codes can be raised and then handled with controller/view patterns using an exceptions controller as a starting point. So, you can raise NotFound, BadRequest, NotAcceptable, etc
  

• Parameterized Actions
  
  • You can define the params you want to grab out of the params collection in your method signature: def note_edit(title, body) will grab params[:title], params[:body]
    
  • This allows you treat your controller methods more like real methods with overloads.
  • For example: if you define:
  • def foo(param1, param2) ...end
  • def foo(param1)...end
  • Then some_url/foo/1?param2='foo' maps def foo(param1, param2)
  • and, some_url/foo/1 maps def foo(param1)
  
  
• Uses standard ruby “gems” for plugins.
  
• Your plugins (i.e. gems) can be installed in a application specific /gems folder or as standard “gem install”

• Parts (which are like reusable components) can define their own layout, views and controller

Happy Merb'ing