One particularly sweet and surprising piece of tech news happened just before Christmas, traditionally a pretty slow time of year for most important announcements: Rails and Merb will be merged into Rails 3.

Judging from the wealth of comments on both David Heinemeier Hansson's and Yehuda Katz's blog posts about it, the news was enthusiastically received by both communities. As one of the nearly 200 commenters on DHH's blog post announcing the merger wrote, "Rails 3 FTW!"

Over on the Eden Development blog, Chris wrote

Now, the best bits of merb will become Rails 3, and some of the best ruby coders in the business will be working on the framework we use every day. That’s a great thing for Rails users everywhere. Despite the claims of some, it’s not about one set of people ‘winning’ and one ‘losing’. Ultimately the combined codebase is the real winner, and therefore the people that use it, such as companies like ourselves. We’ll certainly do all we can to support the move here.

While tentatively scheduled to release during RailsConf May 4-7 in Las Vegas (an admittedly ambitious timeframe), DHH recently noted that the flow of Merb ideas into Rails 3 is already under way.

The Call for Participation for RailsConf is open until February 17--a much longer period than usual, precisely to accommodate new developments like this.