So, GraffitiWok was my first adventure using Merb and DataMapper after a fair amount of Rails experience. Although, I stopped fairly near the beginning to work on my blog app, Wistle which also benefits from these great libraries. Some thoughts about using them.

Merb

I’m excited about the forthcoming merging of Merb and Rails, because I really like Merb, but it doesn’t have all the toys Rails has. Part of that’s good, because I don’t always want even most of the Rails stuff. As I understand, the merging will include Rails having Merb’s ability to specifically load various parts of the framework (and different ORMs, testing libraries, etc). The ability to have more control over dependencies is really nice, even when I’m not concerned about memory: I just like having a better idea of what all I’m loading with the app. For GraffitiWok, there wasn’t a whole lot I needed.

I did start using haml more than erb. Haml is great, although I’m still more comfortable in ERB. I guess that’s mostly personal preference.

The display method (roughly similar to Rails’ render method) is one of my favorite features of Merb and something I use consisently in the GraffitiWok code. It’s just easier to use. I also really like that what’s rendered can just be a string returned from the action method. Much more simple and logical, at least to me.

DataMapper

There are occassions when I just don’t get DataMapper. Like how do I order a query by random(). Seriously. Anyway, the models in GraffitiWok were pretty simple, except maybe the user stuff. I really like listing the properties in the models. Anyway, for the most part I’m more than willing to say goodbye to active record. I can’t think of any particularly telling example, but DataMapper just makes more sense to me. I guess it’s the feeling that there’s less crazy magic going on.