Merb
Lessons Learned & Where Do We Go From Here

Engine Yard

Ruby is slow

“It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t
be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that
Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people are
hard at work on faster implementations of the
language, but right now, it’s tough.”
Alex Payne, Twitter

Does this discourage me from Ruby or Rails? Hell
no. To me the elegance of the language
completely dominates its flaws... I’ll wait for the
performance and scale issues to be fixed in
subsequent releases
Daniel Miessler

You will also find that Ruby is one of the slowest
languages in existence.
Sam (harparkrat@gmail.com)

\"Ruby is slow\": a JIT is under development, the
VM has a lot of room for performance
improvements, and hardware keeps getting
faster. Java was slow for the hadware that
existed when it was originally created.
Luis (lcrespom@gmail.com)

I for one am scared of Ruby because ... it's
known to be slow, so if you become The Next
MySpace, you'll be buying 5 times as many
boxes as the .NET guy down the hall.
Joel Spolsky

Rails is for the vast majority of web applications
Fast Enough... I just happen to care much more
about free developer cycles and am willing to
trade the former for the latter.
David Heinemeier Hansson

Would you rather come to market late on the
back of an inferior development environment
(asp.net) or make it to market first with a
superior development system and work to
alleviate the scalability issues?
Jim Jones, RunFatBoy.net

Ruby is so embarassing.

To Summarize

Rails is slow.

Ruby is slow.

“The slowest programming language in the world”

Our response?

It’s ok.

I program faster.

WTF!

Someone must have done some benchmarks, right?

Simple, real app

raw PHP: 331
rps

cakephp: 3.6

with code
acceleration

88 rps. With
Rails.

Existing results?

Let’s try and replicate with Merb

Hello world.

Merb

Merb Static HTML

Merb Static HTML PHP

Merb Static HTML PHP Cake

While we’re on the topic of benchmarks

Merb router Merb controller Sinatra Rails

Merb router Merb controller Sinatra Rails CakePHP

We don’t need to be embarassed

The future...

Merb 2.0

Modular

Integrated

“It’s hard”

Yep.

Django.

Edit Your DB (Auto-admin)

Admin Hooks for Slices

Admin Hooks for Slices (central /admin)

Merb ORM interface

Possible to build stacks with AR/Prototype

Mailer becomes Messenger

Process

1.0 is a stake in the ground

1.x are back-compatible, stable experiments

We will run the 1.0 public spec suite against 1.x releases

We will support 1.0 via 1.0.x

Once 1.2 is released, only 1.0 and 1.2 are supported
with bug fixes.

We will backport security patches to 1.x until 2.0.

Public API means extensive community involvement

Keep an eye on slices

To summarize:

To summarize: Merb 2.0 is about Rapid Prototyping

To summarize: Merb 2.0 is still metal

Opt-out should be granular

Legos

Legos vs. Duplos

Want to get involved?

Central slice repository

Work on the wiki

Help test RC1

Report missing functionality in @api public

Experiment

Report success

Merbunity.com:

Merbunity.com: List Your Site

Thank you!
• Carl Lerche • Andy Delcambre • Patrick Crowley
• Matt Aimonetti • Avrohom Katz • Ryan Felton
• Ezra Zygmuntowicz • Ben Burkert • Leah Silber
• Wayne Seguin • Daniel Neighman • FiveRuns
• Michael Ivey • Tim Carey-Smith • NewRelic
• Fabien Franzen • Drew Colthorp • topfunky
• Michael Klishkin • Rob Kaufman
• Paul Sadauskas • Wesley Beary

And Everyone Else I Missed ;)

Questions?