This year seems to be the perfect time to adopt a web development framework that is at the forefront of technology, moreover, one that is cost and time efficient in this world that demands speed in all the digital platforms. We are talking about Ruby on Rails.
There must be some strong reason why startups like Github, Gitlab, Netflix, Airbnb, Hulu, Groupon, are built in Ruby on Rails, let’s figure out some of them.
Pros of Ruby on Rails
Save Time and Money
One of the most significant advantages of RoR is that it was built for developing an application at high speed. I.e. it has many ready-made libraries (named gems) that allow constructing a web application in a short time. It also promotes writing code which is really close to the natural English language, so it is easier to understand.
“Thanks to its intuitive, simple and readable syntax resulting in much higher productivity, Ruby has been a great fit for startups or any companies that would like to deliver (and extend) software products as soon as potentially possible. Faster development means better savings (quicker time-to-market), which is important for startups with a limited budget”, Błażej Kosmowski, Tech Expert.
Ruby on Rails makes it easy for developers to implement multiple features at once, by making use of the Model View Controller (MVC) architectural pattern and having different layers taken care by various components in a very consistent manner across applications.
Reuse of code goes beyond a typical deduplication strategy, incorporating meta-programming and the dynamic extension of existing parts of the architecture.
Regarding cost, Rails is a free and open source licence and approved by the Free Software Foundation, furthermore, the gems can be downloaded for free from the project itself using a tool named Bundler, which saves a lot of time.
Scalability
Scalability is one of the most critical aspects when developing a web application. Scalability is the ease at which a system can process increasing amounts of data over time.
The architecture of an RoR application has great scalability potential due to its modularity, which means the possibility to divide the system into engines, modules and gems. It also conforms very well to the twelve factor app principles, which allows it to be scaled horizontally in a natural way.
This fact can be well appreciated whenever popular Platforms as a Service (Paas) such as Heroku help you to scale the applications by just clicking a few buttons or interacting a simple slider control.
Libraries
According to Yalantis, the philosophy behind Ruby on Rails is often described by referring to the software design paradigm Convention Over Configuration. This implies that the framework is composed in a way that decreases the number of decisions that a developer has to make while keeping the framework itself flexible and easy to customise.
RoR has dozens of open-source libraries, appropriately called gems, that are used for different purposes. Most of the core components of building any application have already been built and are maintained by a large community of developers.
Visit https://rubygems.org/news/popular to see some of the most popular gems.
Cons of RoR
Documentation:
Even though the Rails community is large and has lots of information, often it can be hard to find good, well-structured documentation, especially regarding less popular gems.
Security Issues
Gems support is up to the community; therefore, there isn’t a top-level entity supervising what gems are safe to use. Many projects still use outdated gems even though they’re not regularly updated according to the most recent security issues, which can compromise an entire application.
Continuous evolution
This point is not necessarily negative. Continuous evolving for the betterment of a system is a great thing. However, in this case, constant change can be confusing, especially for beginners in Rails. Usually, the modifications happen not only to the framework itself but to the tools and libraries developed by the community.
Developers opinions
“Yes, Ruby was bad and Rails was slow. But that is not true to say in 2018, and won’t be in 2019. Ruby isn’t slow and Rails does scale. If it doesn’t for you, maybe you’ve chosen the wrong tools for the problem you’ve got”, Vinicius Brasil, Software engineer.
“The synergy between a cool language, pragmatic web framework, and superb community gives Rails a result much better than the sum of its parts”, Krešimir Bojčić, T-SQL Developer.
“The Ruby language itself is a solid choice as a beginning coding language. It’s easy to read and does a lot of the work for you. Other languages, like C, require a lot more code to do something you can accomplish in a few lines with Ruby”, Rosie Thomas, Ruby Engineer at financial data software company MX.
Conclusion
As with all programming languages, Ruby has some shortcomings and limitations. But weighing the pros and cons in a balance, the benefits are significantly larger than the drawbacks.
Developers and big companies have taken the decision to build successfully their web applications on Rails, showing the high quality is possible to obtain working with it.
Ruby on Rails is not only about the technology, but it is also about the workflow and the creation of a first class product.
