Merb 0.9.3 has been released recently and marks the next milestone on the road to the significant 1.0 version. It is mostly a bug-fix release, nevertheless, there are some new features:
- HTTP basic authentication built into Merb core
- deferred requests now work on the webservers Ebb and Thin (see Ezra's blog for more details)
- easier usage of Rack init files
- bug fixes for file sending
- and many small fixes
A few days ago, Merbunity, a community site for Merb users, has been launched. They plan to publish Merb-related news, tutorials and screencasts. There isn't much content available yet, but it might be worth keeping an eye on it.
Merb developer Ezra Zygmuntowicz has also been busy "racking up rails" on his Rails-fork on GitHub. Ezra explains:
So i’ve spent this week hacking on Rails, specifically going spelunking in ActionPack and porting Merb’s rack machinery to rails. I figure that merb is a very nice experimentation ground and decided it was time to give some love back to the framework that inspired merb.Ezra was also able to speed up Rails' request handling and saving some memory by simplifying the code and moving parts out of the big mutex lock around the request processing.
While still not complete, I have made significant headway on racking up rails in my github fork of Rails. I’ve added rack adapters for mongrel, eventedmongrel, thin, ebb and webrick. All of this is controlled via ./script/rackup in a rails app.
Rack's success is also continuing on other fronts: Nick Sieger releasead JRuby-Rack, an adapter that allows any Rack-based application to run in a standard Java servlet container. JRuby-Rack is also included in the latest release of Warbler, a gem to create war files from Rails projects.