This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

"Foy is a gifted writer and his descriptions of the philosophies that( impacted the design and implementation of Merb are definitely useful to( everyone affected by the changes in Rails 3."

–Obie Fernandez, Series Editor

The Expert Guide to Building Merb Applications

Thousands of Ruby and Rails developers are discovering the extraordinary scalability, agility, flexibility, and performance offered by the new Merb MVC framework. The Merb Way is the first comprehensive guide to using, extending, and deploying Merb. Like the bestseller The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley, 2008), this book can either be read cover-to-cover as a tutorial or used for modular coverage that makes it an ideal task reference. Foy Savas systematically covers everything developers need to know to build production-quality Merb applications, offering detailed code examples for jumpstarting virtually any project.

Savas is not only involved in the Merb project as an open source contributor: He uses Merb every day as a professional developer. Drawing on his extensive practical expertise, he delves deeply into the Merb framework's architecture and source code, revealing its elegance and offering powerful best practices for using it. To maximize this book's practical value, he also covers the tools most widely used alongside Merb, including the DataMapper ORM, the RSpec tester (and associated behavior-driven development techniques), and several leading Merb plugins.

The Merb Way will help you

• Master Merb innovations that will be incorporated into Rails 3

• Understand the fundamentals of Merb development, one step at a time

• Use Merb's sophisticated application router to guide incoming requests

• Explore the Merb stack, master its configuration options, and dive into its internals

• Use Merb controllers to integrate application code, handle responses, and manage sessions, filters, and exceptions

• Build templates with both ERB (Erubis) and HAML

• Use the DataMapper ORM to represent object properties and behaviors

• Learn best practices for RESTful development with Merb

• Leverage Helpers to simplify many common development tasks

• Refactor code, encapsulate it in gems, and share it across multiple applications

• Customize the responses your application sends to each user

• Gain a deep, practical understanding of Merb plugins and extensibility

• Authenticate users with Merb's modular authentication plugin

• Configure, generate, describe, and test Merb mailers

• Use the merb-parts gem to create component-like regions on Web pages

• Cache content to relieve stress on Web servers

• Make the most of Behavior Driven Development and testing with RSpec