Merb

Lessons Learned & Where Do We Go From Here

Engine Yard

Ruby is slow

“It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it’s tough.”

Alex Payne, Twitter

Does this discourage me from Ruby or Rails? Hell no. To me the elegance of the language completely dominates its flaws... I’ll wait for the performance and scale issues to be fixed in subsequent releases

Daniel Miessler

You will also find that Ruby is one of the slowest languages in existence.

Sam (harparkrat@gmail.com)

"Ruby is slow": a JIT is under development, the VM has a lot of room for performance improvements, and hardware keeps getting faster. Java was slow for the hadware that existed when it was originally created.

Luis (lcrespom@gmail.com)

I for one am scared of Ruby because ... it's known to be slow, so if you become The Next MySpace, you'll be buying 5 times as many boxes as the .NET guy down the hall.

Joel Spolsky

Rails is for the vast majority of web applications Fast Enough... I just happen to care much more about free developer cycles and am willing to trade the former for the latter.

David Heinemeier Hansson

Would you rather come to market late on the back of an inferior development environment (asp.net) or make it to market first with a superior development system and work to alleviate the scalability issues?

Jim Jones, RunFatBoy.net

Ruby is so embarassing.

To Summarize

Rails is slow.

Ruby is slow.

“The slowest programming language in the world”

Our response?

It’s ok.

I program faster.

WTF!

Someone must have done some benchmarks, right?

Simple, real app

raw PHP: 331 rps

cakephp: 3.6

with code acceleration

88 rps. With Rails.

Existing results?

Let’s try and replicate with Merb

Hello world.

Merb

Merb Static HTML

Merb Static HTML PHP

Merb Static HTML PHP Cake

While we’re on the topic of benchmarks

Merb router Merb controller Sinatra Rails

Merb router Merb controller Sinatra Rails CakePHP

We don’t need to be embarassed

The future...

Merb 2.0

Modular

Integrated

“It’s hard”

Yep.

Django.

Edit Your DB (Auto-admin)

Admin Hooks for Slices

Admin Hooks for Slices (central /admin)

Merb ORM interface

Possible to build stacks with AR/Prototype

Mailer becomes Messenger

Process

1.0 is a stake in the ground

1.x are back-compatible, stable experiments

We will run the 1.0 public spec suite against 1.x releases

We will support 1.0 via 1.0.x

Once 1.2 is released, only 1.0 and 1.2 are supported with bug fixes.

We will backport security patches to 1.x until 2.0.

Public API means extensive community involvement

Keep an eye on slices

To summarize:

To summarize: Merb 2.0 is about Rapid Prototyping

To summarize: Merb 2.0 is still metal

Opt-out should be granular

Legos

Legos vs. Duplos

Want to get involved?

Central slice repository

Work on the wiki

Help test RC1

Report missing functionality in @api public

Experiment

Report success

Merbunity.com:

Merbunity.com: List Your Site

Thank you!

• Carl Lerche

• Matt Aimonetti

• Ezra Zygmuntowicz

• Wayne Seguin

• Michael Ivey

• Fabien Franzen

• Michael Klishkin

• Paul Sadauskas

• Andy Delcambre

• Avrohom Katz

• Ben Burkert

• Daniel Neighman

• Tim Carey-Smith

• Drew Colthorp

• Rob Kaufman

• Wesley Beary

• Patrick Crowley

• Ryan Felton

• Leah Silber

• FiveRuns

• NewRelic

• topfunky

And Everyone Else I Missed ;)

Questions?