Think of the Coders

Finally, somebody said it: Save The Developers.

I also noticed that the new version of merb has been out for quite some time now. I played with merb briefly (0.5.3) and really liked its design philosophy. It felt like I had control over what I was doing without requiring an absurd amount of configuration. One of my biggest complaints about Rails is that there seems to be four ways to do everything, and the documentation on the options is often out of date or conflicting.

Thankfully, you can barely find any merb docs, so there is less confusion! Seriously though, the current release is making a big push to properly document a public API, and merb seems so well done that I'm sure it'll be easy to grok.

My experience with it was definitely pleasant the first time. Merb + Datamapper for a simple app would serve pages at about 700 req/s on my home machine, when an equivalent Rails + ActiveRecord app would only hit about 120 req/s. Of course all scaling issues don't really matter until you have lots of traffic, but any advantage is useful.

Also, while reading about Rack, I ran across this presentation that included something called Coset. It was basically an extra layer on top of Rack that would serve RESTful web services. The example code was brilliantly easy to understand, but I can't find a site for it anywhere. Anyone have any ideas where to find this thing?

The ideas for this summer continue to pile up.