rapid software development
In the past 10 years there has been an absolutely amazing proliferation of rapid development tools and practices that have transformed software development in general and internet development in particular. One that has had the buzz for a while now is Ruby on Rails. You're probably familiar with it.

Lately, I've heard much buzz about a RoR alternative: merb. Merb and Rails are expected to merge in an upcoming release. Merb advertises high performance and a lightweight framework. I have to say, one of the things that has never pleased me about RoR is the extent of the scaffolding. I've never used it in a high-performance environment myself, simply because of its reputation, but performance improvements are always welcome.

That said, I can spin up a new rails application in about 20 minutes. I have now spent the equivalent of three days spread over the past few weeks attempting to get merb to work for me. The problem appears to be that no linux system I have access to--not the latest Ubuntu, not the CentOS I have access to, and not a smattering of not-quite-latest Ubuntus can actually deliver me a working set of packages. On some hosts I can't run 'merb-gen' without collapsing in a fit of stack traces. In others I can get the skeleton built, but attempting to use any orm (datamapper or active record) result in similar catastrophic errors.

Moreover, the whole thing began with many false starts as just about every merb tutorial I can find on the web is woefully out of date, offering procedures that simply don't work. Apparently merb has changed its commandline options on several occasions.

You know, it's just not rapid development if you can't get started.

Reluctantly, I will return to rails for my prototyping work.