Much of Merb’s momentum has been merged into Rails 3, but one-time Engine Yard developer Daniel Neighman has found himself moving in a new direction, inspired by what they had once achieved with Merb Slices. Since then, he’s taken fully-mountable Rack applications to the extreme in creating Pancake, a tool & framework to let you stack and loosely couple Rack-based webapps.

Daniel states that web “applications should be self contained rack applications, able to function as gems, able to pick up an entire application and mount it inside another, able to inherit the whole application and take care of the low level plumbing,” and also “let you create your own type of application when required.” Pancake achieves this by building upon some excellent existing projects, including Tilt for templating, Usher for routing, and Hashie to extend the features of Ruby’s hashes and give them additional object-like functionality. Read More

Rango is a Rack-based lightweight Web framework by Jakub Šťastný that has seemingly borrowed a little bit less from past Ruby frameworks and a bit more from Django. Based on the 1.9 version of Ruby, Rango works with rvm, Rip, Usher, Warden, and both the new Gem bundler and the venerable DataMapper by default.

Philosophically, “Rango is attempting to be as agnostic as possible, valuing simple, readable code.  It intends to encourage explicit code rather than implicit magic.”  Modularity is a top priority. In many ways it feels like Ramaze, but with a newer “era of Rack” foundation. There’s a good “Why Use Rango” article available if you want to get a feel for the project and why you might consider using it. Read More