After the 1.0 official release, Merb is gaining more and more attention.

I’ve updated JettyRails to support Merb 1.0 applications, making it a good choice to run your rails and merb applications with JRuby, particularly in development time.

The release notes include:

* Merb 1.0 support!
* jruby-rack updated to the latest release (0.9.3)
* jetty server update to 6.1.14
* JSP and JSP Expression Language support
* some minor bugs

It is very simple to run any Merb 1.0.x and Rails 2.x applications. You just need to have JRuby properly installed, but JettyRails doesn’t work with jruby-1.1.4 (JRUBY-2959). First step is to install jetty-rails:

jruby -S gem install jetty-rails

Then, for Rails applications:

cd myrailsapp
jruby -S jetty_rails

And for Merb applications:

cd mymerbapp
jruby -S jetty_merb

Please note that you can’t use Merb with DataMapper in JRuby right now, but ActiveRecord does the job. Work is being done by Yehuda Katz (wycats) and Nick Sieger to port the native parts of DataObjects (used by DataMapper) in the do_jdbc project. Because of that, you can’t just install the merb gem. Wanted Merb modules should be installed separately:

jruby -S gem install merb-core # required
jruby -S gem install merb-more # extras