Big news today in the Ruby web application world: the Rails and Merb projects are merging. That's right; Merb 2.0 and Rails 3.0 will be one and the same.

 For more in-depth discussion of how this will work, check out the blog posts by Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson and Merb project lead -- and now Rails core team member -- Yehuda Katz. It's exciting stuff and, if done right, will bring a whole new era of increased speed and modularity to Rails, while maintaining its sensible defaults and ease of use.

Interestingly, this isn't the first time two highly visible web frameworks have merged their efforts and codebases in such a way. As Yehuda points out, something very similar happened between Java's <a href="http://struts.apache.org/2.x/">Struts</a> and WebWork 2 in 2005.

In any case, work on the integration will be starting immediately. The hope is to have a beta-worthy candidate of the Rails 3 branch in time for <a href="http://en.oreilly.com/rails2009/">RailsConf</a> next May. In the meantime, work will also continue on Rails 2.3, which should be ready sometime in January. What a nice (and wholly unexpected) holiday present for the Ruby community!