One of my favorite things about Ruby on Rails is the Convention Over Configuration principle. Everybody works in the same fashion, applying the same techniques and trying to keep the same pace with the community.
But when we talk about Ruby frameworks there are two mayor candidates: Rails and Merb.
Both of them with some pros and cons, but equally powerful and with very strong motivated communities around them.
Rails is focused on rapid and agile development for web developers, while Merb is focused on speed and extensibility and it’s totally ORM agnostic while Rails comes packaged with Active Record.
Why not take the best features of each framework and merge them together?
Well that’s what Rails 3 is about, and It’s gonna be awesome, there are a bunch of new features already being polished and getting ready to rock the world.
If you want to know what it’s gonna taste, check out this great Webcast from O’Reilly guys. Quite long but totally worth it.