What makes rails great

That is why a special tool was created to optimize the development process — Rails. Rails is a web development framework written in the Ruby language and introduced 9 years after the initial release of Ruby. It was created to make programming web apps easier, helping to build websites of any complexity. It also marked the beginning of the massive popularity of Ruby and the arrival of Ruby on Rails companies that recognized its potential, us included.

Why choose Ruby on Rails? The main goal of Ruby is to quickly create new high-performance web projects. No web development company would treat code as something that exists outside of the business goals of a project. Each programming language, each technology stack is designed to solve some problems. So depending on the purpose, RoR might or might not be the right choice for your web project but rather yes than no.

As for the question of why is Ruby on Rails so popular, even despite the recent considerable growth of Node. Thanks to the simplicity of prototyping, Rails is used by startups, non-profit projects, and big companies alike. Ruby is the 11th most popular language in the TIOBE index it shows how popular a certain programming language is, based on the SERP results which is several points up compared to Stack Overflow Developer Survey names Ruby the 14th most popular programming language in the world with 7.

The number of live websites created using Ruby on Rails is almost K worldwide with nearly 4 million that have existed at some point , and this number is growing.

RoR is also strongly developer-oriented and is well-liked by developers. Still a joy to work with every day. Ruby on Rails is a preferred technology for startups, though it has also attracted many top tiers. So why use Ruby on Rails and why did these companies decide to use RoR for the development of their web projects?

The answer lies in the list of advantages and disadvantages of Ruby on Rails which is coming next. Ruby is clear, simple, logical, and has a lean code-base allowing for fewer lines of redundant code resulting in accelerated development speed. Simply because less amount of code means less time spent on writing it while the functionality remains the same.

Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days. The more time development takes, the more expensive it is. Because of the speed with which Rails websites can be built and modified, less money is spent on creating and maintaining them. Taking into account that an application is properly designed and its development process in a given company that renders its Ruby on Rails development services is set correctly.

The Rails framework is very flexible and allows to adapt websites to various updates related to the innovations in the business processes. In case you miss some functionality in the future, there are separate modules for that. Likewise, individual parts of a program or application can be freely modified and expanded later on. It is an incredibly expressive and flexible language that makes it possible to solve one problem in many ways, giving Ruby on Rails developers a lot of freedom and opportunities to find the best-suited solution for a project.

Ruby code is readable and largely self-documenting. Spared of the need to write more documentation than they absolutely have to, developers can take the already existing projects almost on the go. Learn more about Netlify and Jekyll combo here. Instead, you can add more features as the development goes.

A quick prototype is needed - Another crucial advantage. Ruby on Rails is awesome for prototyping. Bare-bones features and usabilities can be developed in an extremely short time.

Creating an MVP will show you what your users want and what your focus should be. History has shown that many large companies have started with Rails, for example Twitter, AirBnB, Hulu, Netflix for more check out our list here , and have either opted for a different framework as the project got larger or just sticked with it. Ruby on Rails has been allowing companies to build a small application or a MVP in no-time.

Quick development process allows to early acquire more users what eventually leads to quicker and more profitable monetization of the app. Ruby and Rails do just a few things but they do them really well. Unfortunately, Ruby on Rails is losing its popularity, and there are some serious reasons why. Some may not even be a deal breaker for you but some of them can cause some real issues for your project. It has to be mentioned - Rails is not a speed demon.

We all remember the whole Twitter vs Rails drama. Is that really true? Yes, you can scale Ruby on Rails. You can either upgrade the server Rails is on or divide the work to multiple servers and tools.

Is it worth it? Well, it really depends on your application. As I have mentioned in the previous paragraph, Rails is considered as relatively less performant back-end technology. Opting for a more performant technology, such as NodeJS or Phoenix, may save you up to a few thousands dollars monthly.

While this feature has a lot going for it, it may be a pain while developing an unconventional application. We often advise our clients what technology is best for a certain type of a project. Sometimes Rails can be a bit too much and there may already be some existing tools that do exactly what our client has requested. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are one of the hottest phrases of the past 4 years.

Most of the modern apps offer some kind of ML integration to help users with tedious tasks or to even automate some jobs by basically replacing jobs and workers with code.

Even Java is considered one of the best technologies for the job. Ruby on Rails is a bit too much for a simple, static website. Since then web has come a long way. Now you can build a great Blog with free, easy to use tools, no need to bring the tank called Ruby on Rails to the table. Are they experienced with Go or Node or any other backend framework? Build your application with that instead. Unfortunately, Ruby on Rails sacrifices some performance in the process. Of course, this may vary on your app requirements and other factors.

Sinatra is a minimalistic alternative to Ruby on Rails. The creators took a bit of a different approach as they only included the most needed components to set up an application and therefore the loading time is relatively quick. This new Ruby framework promises to fix some of the downsides to RoR.

From what we can gather now, Hanami feels like a first true Ruby alternative to Ruby on Rails. Check out Hanami here HanamiRB. It is joining technologies such as Java, Node. What does that mean? You no longer have to worry about your server infrastructure. The cool thing is you only pay for the compute time. Amazon Lambda and the whole Serverless technology is relatively new.

You can read more about Amazon Lambda here. A while back, GitLab has shared their development story about Ruby on Rails. He said that the ecosystem has allowed them to shape a lot of functionality at a high quality and is still without par. The development team run into some challenges. They overcame the performance issues by rewriting some parts of code in Go and using Vue framework.

It is supposedly going to be 3-times faster than Ruby 2. Unfortunately, the release date is unknown. Then they pull out something similar to this amazingly ignorant comparison between Git and PHP to prove their point.

We love to exaggerate cases like this. In fact, I believe that most clients know their options just fine and yet they still decide to go with Rails. What he saw back then, many others can see today. So, why use Ruby on Rails? Ruby makes programmers happy, as advertised. While most developers agree that Ruby is handy, some see it as too much so. They worry about what might happen with all the freedoms that Ruby allows, all the potential for misuse.

Let me illustrate with some monkey patching:. Nohting is sacred—not even a String. This particular error would be easy to spot, but things can get much more sinister:. So, you might be thinking: Can everybody and their mother mess up my precious application? It may seem counterintuitive, but then again, so is driving cars at 60 MPH in opposite directions separated only by a thin white line in the middle of the road. In practice, both work remarkably well. Another benefit is that Ruby is a versatile tool.

As such, it has sharp, knife-like edges. I like to think that grown-ups can handle knives just fine—child-proofing is for, well, children Tweet. Admittedly, Ruby misses out on some features that other languages have Lisp hmm, hmm. My first few years with Ruby were humbling.

Sometimes, I was amazed; sometimes, I was mad; but eventually, this knowledge enabled me to communicate with my computer much more effectively than before.

He was struggling. I could feel his pain as he was unable to set a myriad of options and configuration parameters that should have been framework defaults in the first place. With age, my standards for artificial complexity have grown higher and higher.