"Yehuda Katz has done amazing work on Rails 3 and Bundler. When he tells me that he’s not going to abandon Ember.JS, I believe him, because he has a track record proving so"
Uhhh nothing against Yehuda but I strongly object to this as someone who got burned badly with Merb. I've also seen his Rails.app Kickstarter project languishing and how many versions of SproutCore/Amber/Ember have there been that are now completely obsolete? I love a lot of his work but to say he has a track record of not abandoning projects goes against the facts.
This is complete FUD. First of all, I'm not familiar with Merb but didn't it merge with Rails? Regarding Rails.app, how is it languishing? Yehuda has given status updates[1] and code is on Github right now[2]. SproutCore continues to be developed to this day[3]. Ember was briefly named Amber for about a day. What are you talking about?
As someone who worked on a Merb app fulltime for about 4 years (before merb 1.0 through to well after rails 3 released) it's more accurate to say that Rails got rearchitected with some of the good ideas Merb had on the backend.
In particular, we will do Merb releases with deprecation
notices and other transitional mechanisms to assist
developers in tracking down the changes that will come
between Merb 1.x and Rails 3. Expect a number of interim
releases that get incrementally closer to Rails 3, and
expect parts of Merb (most notably the helpers) to be
ported to run on Rails 3 in order to further reduce
friction.
This very specifically did not happen, and a lot of people are stuck on Merb or had a painful migration. Of note, Rails 3.0's first beta was released Feb 4 2010 (just over a year after the announcement), and 3.0.0 final was August 29. Merb had a 1.1 prerelease Feb 20, and the last version (1.1.3) July 10. Since then Merb has been dead.
Again Yehuda:
You will not be left in the cold and we’re going to do
everything to make sure that your applications don’t get
stuck in the past.
Now I'm sure as part of the merb community I can take some small part in blame of this, but nobody, not merb developers, not rails developers, not merb users (to the best of my knowledge) wound up putting any serious stock into providing anything resembling a migration plan. Which is a shame.
Merb and Rails did merge, but that doesn't mean any reasonably sized Merb codebases had any hope to migrate. It's a different framework with a different ORM. All those developers that followed Katz early on got burned when he joined Rails core.
I do believe Rails.app will be released and Katz has recently given an update (it's dated January 27) but the first dozen comments at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp/comm... will show that there has been some community concern that they bought into vaporware/Ember.js. Those comments went on from November 15 to January 25 before a Hacker News post solicited a comment.
In regards to SproutCore, I was referring to SproutCore 2.0 which became Amber which became Ember.js. Ember.js seems to be coming together nicely, but we are already supporting 4 completely incompatible versions of it. Admittedly we are still at ember-1.0.0-pre.2 and I'm sure the APIs will eventually solidify, but it feels like even new patch versions have been radically incompatible.
Definitely excited to see Rails 4, Ember 1.0, etc. for the record. I just have spent a significant amount of time cleaning up the messes of abandoned Merb codebases so I couldn't help but point out that Katz's legacy has been, at best, mixed here.
FUD is a mid-nineties term about certain MS practices. Best left to the mid-nineties and/or 4chan types. He made a point, make a counterpoint. No reason to call what he wrote FUD or trolling or whatever. Especially when he writes that we was personally affected by the Merb thing.
>First of all, I'm not familiar with Merb but didn't it merge with Rails?
How is that different from the Merb project that he relied upon being abandoned? That he was given an "upgrade path" if he took the time to rewrite his apps to use the new post-merge Rails?
>Regarding Rails.app, how is it languishing? Yehuda has given status updates[1] and code is on Github right now[2].
- Status updates after someone brought the whole issue to HN attention?
- With things promised to backers still not sent whole months after the promised dates?
- And with taking the money to work on the project and then devoting his time in another venture?
Maybe the project is not "languishing", but it sure is late. And "did something else in the meantime" is not a proper excuse to paying backers.
>SproutCore continues to be developed to this day
By others. But the subject matter on this subthread was Katz as a contributor, and he has migrated away long ago.
Uhhh nothing against Yehuda but I strongly object to this as someone who got burned badly with Merb. I've also seen his Rails.app Kickstarter project languishing and how many versions of SproutCore/Amber/Ember have there been that are now completely obsolete? I love a lot of his work but to say he has a track record of not abandoning projects goes against the facts.