Glenn Gillen has a nice writeup on the new features presented in MerbCamp. And here is day 2.
Starting with Merb: a collection of links
Merb homepage.
Ruby Enterprise Edition. Apparently Ruby plus tcmalloc. All the cool kids are using it.
Phusion Passenger. The Apache module formerly known as mod_rails. Version 2.0 has support for Rack. Rack is a good idea:
Rack provides a minimal interface between webservers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks.
The Merb docs on deploying with Passenger.
Merb is ORM agnostic so grab DataMapper too. Or maybe Sequel.
Merb focusing on controler logic rather than shoving down developers throat a particular, bloated ORM engine is a very refreshing change from current trends in web frameworks. And it continues with its choice of a view rendering policy. There is none.
Merb is not yet 1.0 and still very much on active development. Grab it from from git.
If you choose DataMapper you may want to live on the edge.
Or just follow and easy, short tutorial to get started faster.
Haml is interesting too.