Well, that's exactly what happened over the recent holiday break. The once warring Ruby on Rails and rival Merb communities decided to mend their rift and work together to integrate the best of Merb into the next major release of Ruby on Rails, also known as RoR or simply Rails.

Like some other open-source efforts that produce similar technology—read JBoss and Spring, for one—the development teams can tend to at best not trust one another, or at worst, just plain not like one another. It is no secret that there have been flame wars between the Rails and Merb communities. Merb has been referred to Ruby on Rails for the enterprise. The Merb team used to emphasize that its goal was to make RoR more scalable, and one of the knocks against Ruby on Rails has been that it doesn't scale well. Indeed, when a rumor took off in summer of 2008 that Twitter was considering abandoning Rails, the primary reason given was that problems with Rails scalability were causing problems for Twitter. Those rumors of Twitter dropping RoR proved not to be true, however.

In any event, on Dec. 23, 2008, the Ruby Team and the Merb teams decided to bury the hatchet and merge some of the best ideas from Merb into what will become Rails 3.

Read the rest of this article on eWEEK.com.