jwesonga

This week I've began refreshing my ruby know how, it's been a while since I actively prgrammed in ruby or ruby on rails, in fact the last time I checked it out was during my time in the states when I was working on heekya. So with the possibility of getting some projects coming in I decided to get back into the ruby dance :-)

Having refreshed myself I decided to get into the dev part, the choice between Rails or Merb comes into play, which one do you go for? I guess it might be a moot point since eventually Merb will be merged into the rails core to form Rails 3.0 but before that happens which route does one choose?

Merb offers an ORM agnostic framework that allows the developer to choose between DataMapper and ActiveRecord (ActiveRecord is the core and sole ORM layer in Rails)-most devz claim DataMapper is faster and more robust,Merb also allows you to pick which libraries/gems to work with instead of bundling everything this means the general skeleton of your app tends to be lighter, allowing the developer to choose which javascript framework and template language to work with is also a major benefit of Merb. The only downside to all these goodies is the small developer community but that's bound to change as the process of merging the two gets into top gear.

In the mean time as a developer you have your choice to make, if you go the merb way you're probably at the bleeding edge of Rails 3.0, you decide..