Born a pastie

Zoom back to September 9, 2006. If you were using Rails, it was version 1.1. As for Git, it was still just something the Linux kernel used. So naturally, when Ezra Zygmuntowicz needed to publicly distribute the then only 120-line source code for Merb, a pastie made the most sense. Turn back a few pages and you’ll find that pastie, prepended to this book in all of its glory. Look it over once and you’ll realize Ezra had an itch to scratch: fast Ruby template rendering with the smallest possible memory footprint. To do this he used only two gems, Mongrel and ERB, which, for those keen on etymology, also serve as the roots of the name Merb itself. But like any project that starts off both small and practical, it grew. A few months later a gem was put up on RubyForge. For a while it came with an example app that touted Merb’s ability to handle file uploads while not locking out other requests. This became the most popular use of Merb, often appearing coupled with Rails applications in the wild.