Is ruby on rails really a legitimate choice for developing web apps and websites?
Scalable, secure, well supported and there are many more advantages of ruby on rails to add. In this guide, we will you through the top 10 incredibly useful advantages of ruby on rails.
Let’s look at some of the benefits that set Ruby on Rails apart from the competition
Advantages of Ruby on Rails
Cost-effective
The Ruby on Rails framework is 100% free and runs on Linux, which is an open-source framework. It’s also easy to work with from a developer’s perspective. There are tons of gems(plugins) available, so it can save plenty of developer time and effort which can be a great benefit of ruby.
It’s easy to create and maintain the website without spending more money ensuring greater quality, performance, or scalability of your site.
Built on Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture:
In this architecture, a web application has three interconnected layers. The model houses codes that work on the application data. It centralizes the business logic of the application and the rules to manipulate the data. The data to the users, includes HTML, PDF, XML, RSS, and other formats. The controller communicates with models and views. It receives a request from the browser, works with models to process it, and instructs the view on how to display the result to the user correctly.
Easy to manage changes
Ruby on Rails makes it easy to modify the existing code or add new features to the site. After site launch, future modifications to your site (e.g. making any remarkable changes to the data model) is easy and quick to perform.
This framework is most effective for long-term projects due to its stability and predictability.
Secure
Some security measures are built within the framework and enabled by default. Using Ruby on Rails also means that following the secure development lifecycle, that may be a complicated security assurance method.
Rails community actively works to spot and patch new vulnerabilities and the framework is well documented both officially and unofficially.
Performance
For applications with lots of computation or data handling, Rails could slow the application down. If this is often happening in your application, have a fresh set of eyes take a glance at code optimization — this will greatly improve performance outcomes.
Probably there are particular parts of the codebase that are performing slowly, and therefore the tooling and shared experiences that go along with the Rails community go a long way to support a team addressing performance issues.
Flexibility
Web applications use frontend and backend capabilities of Rails; these are simpler and easier to create, but the application needs to communicate with the server to load the webpage and can lack the immediate responsiveness to a user’s taps and selections as a result.
Single page web applications can be more complex to create but may allow for more involved user interfaces and provide instant responses to user’s actions by only loading portions of the website as needed.
A single page web application would usually use something like Angular, React, or VueJS for frontend. However it will still use Rails as a backend, permitting your application to rely on some of Rails best attributes.
Productivity
Ruby is a concise language, when combined with 3rd party libraries, allows you to develop features incredibly fast. It is one of the most productive programming languages around.
Nearly all of these libraries are released in the form of a gem, a packaged library or application that can be installed with a tool called Ruby Gems.
Consistent
Developers follow standardized file storage and programming conventions that keep a project structured and readable. Additionally saves lots of time.
Large Community
It’s one of the most popular languages on social coding site GitHub. The community is full of developers that are constantly improving code and serving to others on their projects.
If you need a given piece of functionality, there’s every chance that someone else has built something similar before or is willing to help you fix any issues you may have. You’ll still need a capable team to work with the code.
A large repository of free plugins
The abundance of free plugins, referred to as gems, is another RoR advantage. In operating with RoR, you can customize your website for any business need – for example, create your own exclusive social network or introduce advanced e-commerce services with a high degree of user data protection.
Disadvantages of Ruby on Rails?
Runtime Speed
One of the areas of concern is slow runtime speed. It’s true that other top environments and frameworks (Node.js or Django) are somewhat faster than RoR.
Twitter, for example, struggled to boost RoR’s performance that deteriorated after the social network became highly popular. Though Twitter did not abandon RoR completely, it had to replace certain internal communication components and server daemons with Scala solutions.
Boot Speed
Boot speed can reduce the developer’s time. Depending on the number of gem dependencies and files, it can take a significant amount of time to start,
We have some questions which you should ask yourself
How much money are you really able to spend?
One should take not solely development and design into consideration. Some maintenance, debugging and adding new functions are required some time later. Be prepared and you’ll avoid plenty of issues within the future.
Do you want to control the site on your own?
Content management systems like WordPress or Joomla provide you the option to manage the content with no help of IT specialists. However, if you’ve got some expertise in managing sites, you need to expect some bugs emerging time by time. Embedding a new plugin, you may get a design conflict. And typically the assistance of a programmer becomes inevitable.
I want to take you through some of these top websites who have used ruby on rails framework
GitHub
GitHub was launched in 2008 to host IT-projects and facilitate developers.Now GitHub boasts around 22 million users and 61 million repositories worldwide and considered as the biggest code repository in the world.
AirBnB
Airbnb is one of the most popular RoR web apps among travelers. Launched in 2008. Airbnb is an online marketplace and hospitality service, enabling people to lease or rent short-term lodging including vacation rentals, apartment rentals, homestays, hostel beds, or hotel rooms.
Shopify
Founded in 2006, Shopify has raised over $122 million in funding for the growth of its platform. Shopify lets you build your own online store. You can accept credit cards, manage orders, customise your storefront and more.
Now, with this few points that give you the benefits and downside of Ruby on Rails, one can clearly decide the importance of Ruby on Rails for business.
Ruby on Rails has proven to be the best fit for the business.
If you have a custom requirement to be built using ruby on rails contact us.