specializing in digital media technologies

A couple of months ago I started hearing about the Merb framework, an alternative to the Rails framework for creating Web sites in Ruby. As you may know, Rails came under some fire for not scaling well; Twitter, in particular, had several problems. (Although I would argue that the demands of a site like Twitter are probably in the top 0.1% of all sites, so this concern may not be an issue for most Web sites.) Version 2 of Rails specifically addressed these concerns, but still, people started to look around for alternatives, including not using Ruby at all. This is where Merb came in: a smaller and faster Ruby framework. I hadn’t yet gotten to play with Merb but was going to add it to my framework-comparison homework. That may be a moot point now, as it was just announced that Merb and Rails will work together on the next version of both frameworks. Version 3 of Rails will incorporate some of Merb’s best attributes, resulting in a better Ruby framework for Web development and ending a minor feud within the Ruby community. So the next version of Merb will be Rails 3.0 and the next version of Rails will be influenced by Merb: what does this mean? (continue reading…)

I began my computer consulting career in 1999 as a PHP programmer. For several years, all of the Web sites I created were written in PHP. (I have done a couple of ASP.NET sites, and although I find the technology and the development tools to be impressive, the requirements that you develop and run ASP.NET on Windows is a non-starter for me.) In 2005, while at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, I first played with the Ruby on Rails framework, released a couple of months earlier. So, like many people, I came to Ruby after seeing how brilliant the Rails framework was. At that time, there really were no PHP frameworks that were comparable, although perhaps the Zend Framework, among others, are close enough today. I wanted to talk a bit about how I see PHP and Ruby, but first, a discussion of frameworks… (continue reading…)