SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Engine Yard, a company in cloud deployment and open-source tools for Ruby and Rails applications, has announced the first major release of its open-source framework, Merb. Merb is designed for building fast, high performance Ruby applications. Similar to Ruby on Rails, Merb is an MVC framework but it features a modular rather than monolithic architecture with minimal, clean core code that is simple, organized, and easy to extend.

"Ruby continues to be one of the fastest growing programming languages in terms of adoption," said Ezra Zygmuntowicz, founder of the Merb project and co-founder of Engine Yard. "Merb offers Ruby programmers another choice for building Ruby applications. We believe this release of Merb and the community enthusiasm we've seen for the project since its inception are testament to a healthy and robust Ruby ecosystem."

Built from the ground up and designed for speed, Merb relies on an extensible, pluggable architecture. Though Merb's code base is kept to the bare minimum, it offers powerful features such as flexible routing, more control over groups of processes, and a coherent maintained stack. Additional features can be plugged into the framework using standard gems. Moreover, Merb is agnostic when it comes to object-relational mapping (ORM) tools, JavaScript libraries, and template languages, thus giving programmers a wide range of choice.

Merb is tuned for developers who want a higher degree of configurability and modularity than that offered by Rails. Thanks to extensive community involvement and an ever-growing pool of plugins, Merb allows developers working on smaller applications to replicate common Rails tasks with less overhead and a higher degree of customizability.

"Merb is a fantastic framework for building portable applications," said Russell Taga, director of engineering, Howcast Media. "We've had great success using it and will definitely utilize it more in the future as we continue to scale Howcast.com."

A key feature in Merb 1.0 is the "Merb Stack," a gem for fast, out-of-the-box deployment. This lets developers start building new applications immediately, rather than needing to spend time cobbling together a complete stack on their own. In addition, Merb 1.0 is built on a single master process rather than several disparate processes, which allows groups of Merb processes to share memory. This produces more efficient handling of multiple requests over short periods of time and better control over groups of Merb processes.