I've been following some blogs regarding Merb and finally decided to give it a try. I've been a Rails guy for awhile, but it sounds like a lot of the effort I've had to go through on my own to optimize our sites has already been handled by the core of Merb. Our rails sites have hundreds of thousand of visits per month, which is pretty respectable for any site, especially for Radio stations in rural areas. A lot of Rails sites fail as soon as they get popular because they have focused on the shiny parts and didn't pay attention to the optimization that it takes to be reliable. i think this is really going to hurt Ruby/Rails, because it really hurts the reputation of the language when we see "Rails Error' or "Server Error" when you go to check out someone's project. Merb was designed from the beginning to solve a lot of the underlying problems with Rails that make it difficult to optimize a site and stay reliable. Also, Ezra seems a lot more receptive than the Rails Core, so that's a big win over Rails in itself.

Anywho, I took my first stab at a merb app last night. The app I am looking to create will be something that will need to be able to sustain a lot of very peaked use at very specific times of the day. Totally doable with rails, but I think this would be a good test for me to learn something new.

All of the guides are outdated so it's a little difficult to figure out where to start. Rails and Merb are similar enough that something you think should work doesn't, and there's not a clear reason why until you really dig in. I think there are a lot of Rails guys that would give up before getting to this point. If I can put on my Zed hat, then I'd say that this is maybe a good thing, because they are probably crappy coders who belong in Rails and shouldn't be polluting Merb-land. Once I did figure out some of the equivalents, I moved right along and got into a different way of thinking. It felt easier to debug, but that isn't based on anything I can really explain.

I only have one day with it, and these are just my first impressions.