Afterword

If DHH ain’t doing it, you don’t do it.

(Seems every time some clever fellow gets into trouble it’s because of that.)

—Zed Shaw

This tactfully derisive quote got the last word in Obie Fernandez’s The Rails Way, and for the many who had reached the opinionated limits of the Rails framework it seemed all too true. Aiming to rectify the dilemma with a framework that realistically was built to be as similar as possible, the Merb team pushed the limits of modularity and stack agnosticism. In doing so, they succeeded in proving that the implementation behind Rails could conceptually be cleaned up, and that such a pursuit was ultimately worthwhile because it provided the foundation of a richer, more versatile web framework.