Saw this on Dr. Dobb’s Code Talk today. Big news for the Ruby community and really makes a lot of horse sense. The Merb and Rails projects are planned to merge. Merb 2.0 and Rails 3.0 will be the same.
Check out the blog posts by Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson and Merb project lead -- and now Rails core team member -- Yehuda Katz for more in-depth discussion of how this will work. And, these guys are taking a pragmatic approach to make sure it is done right.
Moving forward, this is especially big news for IronRuby. While at the PDC, I had a chance to chat with Jimmy Schementi about how IronRuby was playing with Merb and Rails. Jimmy had a lot of positive stuff to say. You have Ruby in the browser! That is, a language that runs either on a server or a user’s local machine can be pushed from a web server to run on the client, much like JavaScript, but it can be the same language on the server. Therefore, it could be the same exact code. We’re going to have an awesome development tool set when all these pieces come together.
Speaking of Jimmy, check out his blog post Jimmy hacking (at) Microsoft. A really good perspective on dynamic languages, Ruby, the DLR, Silverlight, Rails and Silverline.