I'll third the recommendation to just dive into Rails.
Camping, like many of _why's toys, is an immensely clever but not necessarily practical exercise is pushing Ruby to its linguistic limits. Merb (soon to be renamed, says the author) was written largely as a high-performance alternative for demanding tasks that Rails would choke on, like uploading and resizing big images.
I'm fully aware that both have matured to the point that people are developing full-fledged sites in them, but I can't see the benefit of "sketching" a web application against one framework's conventions and then learning another when you're ready for more advanced features.
I've developed a very large Rails codebase using the RESTful conventions and I can't recommend them enough. It's nice to have best practices for the sort of features you'll be implementing the most.
by Alex Payne — Dec 10
Camping, like many of _why's toys, is an immensely clever but not necessarily practical exercise is pushing Ruby to its linguistic limits. Merb (soon to be renamed, says the author) was written largely as a high-performance alternative for demanding tasks that Rails would choke on, like uploading and resizing big images.
I'm fully aware that both have matured to the point that people are developing full-fledged sites in them, but I can't see the benefit of "sketching" a web application against one framework's conventions and then learning another when you're ready for more advanced features.
I've developed a very large Rails codebase using the RESTful conventions and I can't recommend them enough. It's nice to have best practices for the sort of features you'll be implementing the most.