Notes from the Ruby/Rails Group, 15-July-2008: Jeremy Durham and Merb

[Ted Roche]

Ten people attended the July meeting of the New Hampshire Ruby / Rails 
group, an affiliate of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group (but 
it's okay if you don't run Linux - there were lots of MacBooks at the 
meeting last night!). Thanks to Scott Garman and Nick Plante for 
organizing the meeting and to Tim Golden and RMC Research for providing 
the excellent facilities.

We started with a good round of introductions where everyone got to 
state who they were, what they were doing and their level of expertise.

Jeremy Durham [1] was our guest speaker and the topic was merb[2]. 
Jeremy explained that the 20-second answer for what's merb is that Merb 
= Mongrel + erb. Merb is a very small and simple web framework that is 
ideal for quick small projects that demand few resources, while still 
providing a thread-safe environment in which to run Ruby. While not 
intended purely as a Rails replacement/competitor, much of what's run in 
Rails can be moved to merb and vice versa with minimal effort. Jeremy 
offered that he often did a coding session in merb for the speed of the 
development cycle, and could then share the models he'd created with his 
team running Rails with minimum changes. Jeremy did a compare/contrast 
with Rails v. merb where merb is ahead in small memory models and 
threading, while Rails has the larger community and richer 
documentation. Jeremy mentioned a new community site: merbunity [3]

Along with the main topic, there were lots of tangential conversations 
on the joys of TextMate, vi vs. emacs, Apple shell defaults, JavaScript 
libraries (did you know there is an entire JavaScript MVC in 
SproutCore[4]? That paperclip is a cool replacement for attachmentfoo 
for uploading files?) which always enrich the presentation.

After the great presentation, there was sufficient time for networking 
and socializing, where folks got to follow up on interesting developments

Thanks to Jeremy for the presentation, and to Scott and Nick and Tim for 
organizing the event and to all for attending and participating!

Topic for the August meeting hasn't been nailed down yet. Stay tuned to 
the announcement mailing list whose links you can find at nhruby.org [5]


[1] http://www.jeremydurham.com/
[2] http://merbivore.com/
[3] http://merbunity.com/
[4] http://www.sproutcore.com/
[5] http://wiki.nhruby.org/index.php/Main_Page

-- 

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com