Merb 0.5 and Haml

Merb 0.5 has just been released. This release is particularly exciting for Haml folks because it includes two important updates to the Merb Haml interface.

First of all, Sass now works out of the box, just like Haml. Merb checks whether you have a public/stylesheets/sass folder, and if you do, loads Sass to deal with it.

Note that this means there is one caveat: if you set the :template_location option for Sass, you’ll still need to manually require it. But I don’t think many people do that.

The other update is that Merb now takes advantage of Haml 1.8’s powerful caching mechanism. This means some pretty sweet performance improvements, especially when partials are involved.

Yehuda Katz (a.k.a. wycats), an awesome Merb developer who’s been working on Haml- and Sass-related stuff, posted some benchmarks about it. These benchmarks compare the performance of Haml running on Merb 0.4.2 to Merb 0.5.0 and Ruby on Rails. They’re in requests per second, so a higher number is better. Yehuda also hastens to point out that these benchmarks were run on his old Macbook, and that “a real machine would give you much better numbers.”