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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 1 Ratings

Good Reference - 2009-07-19
Reviewer Rating:
Merb developers used to be the non-conformists railing (pun intended!) against the inflexibilities of the Rails framework. According to them, Rails' preference for convention over configuration often means no configurability at all, so if one has a need to deviate from the stack like, say, use an Object Relational Mapper (ORM) other than the out-of-the-box ActiveRecord ORM, one would probably have to suffer through hoops to make it happen. Merbheads (you know, like fans of the Rent musical call themselves Rentheads) have been saying this shouldn't and doesn't have to be the case, and with the December 2008 announcement that Merb and Rails will merge to produce a more flexible Rails 3, Merbheads have made their point!

Which brings us to this book. Written by someone who started as a Rails developer and went on to become a contributor to the Merb and DataMapper projects, this book provides details on how Merb is architected to support flexible stack component assembly. It delves into the internal workings of many of the framework's key components, with excellent chapters on Routing, DataMapper, and merb-auth, the really nice authentication plug-in.

The book has a few editing problems (on pages 208-209, for example, the author mentions that SessionStoreContainer inherits from the class StoreContainer, but the code extract for SessionStoreContainer shows it inherits from SessionContainer). I also thought that two Merb innovations deserved more extended discussions than the brief ones provided in the book: Merb Slices (mini Merb MVC apps that can be installed as gems for reuse in multiple applications) and Parts (sort of like widgets, for use as component-like regions on web pages). Although the march to Rails 3 has somewhat slowed down work on Merb Parts, the need for lightweight components is still there, so any discussion that could help move things forward in that front would have been a value-add. Finally, a nitpick: why no reference urls? Readers who are new to Merb will surely appreciate recommendations on websites to visit for further enlightenment and study.

Because the Product Information does not provide a Table of Contents, I thought I'll provide this information to potential readers:

Chapter 1. Fundamentals
Chapter 2. Routing
Chapter 3. Controllers
Chapter 4. Views
Chapter 5. Models
Chapter 6. Helpers
Chapter 7. Slices
Chapter 8. Sessions
Chapter 9. Authentication
Chapter 10. Mailers
Chapter 11. Parts
Chapter 12. Caching
Chapter 13. Testing

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