Firstly a great big thanx to the organizers of Merb Camp 08. It was fantastic and everything went so smoothly.

There’s a whole bunch that happened both at the sprint and at the camp. Number one is that we released Merb RC1 ( 0.9.9 ) It sure has been a long time coming and it’s way exciting to finally see it happen. I think we’ve got a fairly solid release candidtate here and it certainly has generated plenty of interest.

All the talks were fantastic and it’s great to see such a high level of community support. The venue was amazing with questions coming from those watching live on the webcast from all over the world. The 4K demonstration certainly kicked butt, and the wii on a 40×35 ft screen wasn’t too bad either.

Yehuda hit us squarly between the eyes with some very interesting information, demonstrating that in the framework world, Ruby certainly is not slow. You can checkout the goods in his keynote

There was a whole bunch of good talks though, and you can get the low-down on them over at slideshare

Merb RC1 demonstrates the “Merb Stack” The defaults that the Merb team thinks is a good stack to build applications on the web. It’s quite opinionated and runs DataMapper, and also includes jQuery. This in no way means that Merb is any less of a hackers framework. This in fact demonstrates the awesome flexibility that makes Merb a hackers framework. The “Stack” is just a collection of gems. The stack is nothing more than a gem with dependencies and an associated generator. You can use as much or as little as you like. It’s really simple to build your own too if your company has special needs :)

I’ve had a whole bunch of people asking me how to get up and running with merb-auth. Bradly Freeley helped me do some interesting stuff with merb-auth at the sprint and has written a “getting started” post on his blog Also, I’ve updated the wiki with an authenticated “Hello World” app. http://wiki.merbivore.com/authenticated_hello_world

Thanx again to all those people including the people who were on IRC who made Merb Camp 08 so great. What a fantastic experience it was :)