Welcome back to the Vancouver.rb Q&A series. Today let’s welcome Vancouverite Brock Whitten.
Rails is awesome. I try my very best not to say things like Merb is “better” than Rails but it is. Let’s keep in mind that part of the reason it’s great is because it is a lot like Rails and Merb was able to learn from the mistakes Rails learned the hard way. The most obvious advantage that Merb has is for writing APIs. If you were to build an API with Rails you are loading this entire (kitchen sink) framework for something very simple. Think alone of all those view helpers you won’t be using yet they are being loaded for every instance of Mongrel. This is like driving a motor home to the cornerstone to buy milk. Merb on the other hand is broken into chunks (
merb-core,merb-more,plugins) so you only load what you need. This makes Merb multiple times faster than Rails.
