I'm in San Francisco attending QCon 2008 this week.
Martin Fowler gave a good keynote (with Rebecca Parsons) this morning - which I arrived 1/2 way through due to a slight flight arrival delay.
Ruby
10:15AM...Gregg Pollack kicked-off the Ruby track
11AM...I'm sitting in a Ruby presentation that is currently covering Merb
Presenter: Matt Aimonetti, he maintains blogs at:
merbist.com
railsontherun.com
One interesting point made during this morning's Ruby presentations: Ruby's historical bad performance reputation may not be currently valid given certain performance improvements (e.g. Merb compared to raw PHP, leading PHP frameworks, Django, Rails, Code Igniter, etc.)
Merb has three architecture layers (extension points ?):
plugins
slices
API
Merb's adaptability allows replacing core functionality with custom implementations
Benefits of Merb for developing/deploying Ruby applications:
- scalability
- performance
- modularity
- small memory footprint
Take-aways:
- Ruby is not slow
- Merb is flexible
- Merb is modular
- Merb is very scalable
- Yellowpages.com is using Merb for some backend components
- Wikipedia is investigating possible usage of Merb
- Matz (developer of Ruby) "Merb has a bright future...[thinks] will give users more freedom in a Ruby-ish way of programming"
