Shopify’s Success in Using RoR for its One Million Plus Users
Most of us have used Shopify to buy something for our home, a personal item, or any useful tool. Shopify was started in 2004 by three Canadians, inspired by a poor online shopping experience with snowboarding equipment. From then until now, it has achieved great recognition and this year reached more than 1 million users. By 2021, global e-commerce is forecast to be $4.97 trillion — almost a 400% increase in seven years.
Shopify has become an inspiring example of a complex, well-structured, and user-friendly e-commerce platform made with Ruby on Rails (RoR). And it’s absolutely rocking. In short, it’s a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that provides entrepreneurs with the opportunity to create a secure online shop with a broad range of functionality and choose from about 100 payment gateways. For advanced users, there’s also an opportunity to edit design templates.
But why does Shopify use Ruby on Rails?
Ruby on Rails is a web development framework for building web applications. Even though RoR has reached its maturity, it’s still preferred by developers all over the world.
Shopify was launched when RoR was at its most popular. It seemed to be a promising framework at the time, and it is. RoR has allowed Shopify to grow at the same time as the number of its users has increased, it is called scalability. The architecture of an RoR application has great scalability potential due to its modularity, which means the system can be divided into engines, modules, and gems. It also conforms very well to the twelve factor app principles, which allow it to be scaled horizontally in a natural way.
This fact can be well appreciated when popular Platforms as a Service (Paas), such as Heroku, help you to scale the applications by just clicking a few buttons or interacting with simple slider control.
