Merb and Rails, together at last

The Rails team has just announced that Merb, an alternate MVC framework for Ruby, is being merged into Rails 3. Given some recent angst about the splintering of the Ruby Web development community, this is probably good news. I haven’t used Merb, but I was all for more competition. In the open source world, the best developers steal every good idea from their competitors anyway. Between this announcement and the announcement of Rails Metal, it’s looking like the end of year trends in the Ruby Web development community are toward harmony.