For those following the latest on Rails 3.0, the news that Merb will be joining Rails is pretty exciting. Merb is an alternative MVC framework for Ruby that offers a lot more customization than Rails does and focuses on a core, efficient framework with plugins available for customizing to your hearts’ content. So what does this mean for you? First, Rails will now support a lot of the cool plugins that and options out-of-the-box, so you can choose to use JQuery instead of the default Prototype/Scriptaculous bundle Rails currently uses. Or you can use DataMapper instead of ActiveRecord and support legacy databases. This makes integrating your application with different enterprise and existing apps a lot more straightforward. Second, as a community, having a combined, unified goal once again means that much more resources dedicated to improving Rails instead of having each person working on their own framework. Finally, this means that Rails will be much faster and more efficient at its core instead of penalizing performance with features and functionality you don’t care about.
So what does the Rails + Merb merger mean to you? What feature do you anticipate the most?