The Merb and Rails merger

On December 23, 2008, the teams behind two competing Ruby web frameworks announced they would stop competing and join forces: Merb would be merged into Rails 3. A web framework is the shared toolkit you use to build a website’s server side, so the pieces you would otherwise write from scratch, like routing and database access, come ready-made.

Merb was the challenger. It was created by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, with Yehuda Katz as a key developer. By the time of the merger it had been around for about two years and had built a reputation for being lean and modular: fast, and structured so you could opt in or out of individual parts rather than take the whole stack at once. Rails, created by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), was the popular incumbent that Merb had positioned itself against.

Why merge instead of keep fighting

The short answer: they had stopped disagreeing. Yehuda wrote that “there aren’t any clear points that the Merb and Rails team disagree on anymore,” and that with the two projects converging, “it just didn’t seem like there was much to gain by continuing to duplicate effort”. The plan was to fold Merb’s best ideas, its performance work, modularity, and a defined public API, into Rails 3 so the larger Rails community would get them.

The Rails announcement, written by DHH, put it more bluntly: “We’re ending the bickering between Merb and Rails with a this bombshell: Merb is being merged into Rails 3!” Yehuda joined the Rails core team, with Carl Lerche, Matt Aimonetti, and Daniel Neighman (“hassox”) also named as part of the effort. Rivals joining forces is rare in any field, and rarer still when both sides are confident they were right. This time they decided the better software was the one they would build together.

Related: Yehuda Katz · David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) · Rails was pulled out of Basecamp