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Ruby on Rails: What makes it so popular?

Some may think, why the corporates choose to adopt Ruby on Rails to develop web applications instead of engaging other web frameworks and languages. There are many reasons stand ahead, but before we get into the discussion of the advantages and disadvantages, Let’s get to know what is “Ruby on Rails”?

Ruby on Rails is written in Ruby,  general-purpose programming language and dynamic in nature. Many clients and non-developers community often confuse the two, thinking Rails when hearing Ruby but rarely the other way around.

Ruby on Rails is a development tool, which provides web developers a framework. It offers a standard structure for all the codes, that developers write. It simplifies and provides abstracts over repetitive tasks, which becomes a supporting hand in developing new features for the web applications which has fast-changing requirements.

The primal role of Ruby on Rails development is convention over configuration. This helps the programmer, to spend less time configuring files in order to set up/initiate the development. Rails comes with a set of conventions which speeds up the development process to a different phase.

Another specific characteristic of Rails is to emphasis on RESTful app design. Here REST refers to(Representational State Transfer) a style of software architecture based around the client-server relationship. It encourages a logical structure within applications, which means they can easily be deployed as an API(Application Programming Interface).

So, why Ruby on Rails?

We could clearly see that Rails provides us a combination of the best tooling, better quality code libraries and a more realistic approach to software. Lets, take a look at its benefits!

Tooling: ROR offers fantastic tooling that helps developers to deliver more features in less time. It provides a typical structure for all web applications, where all repetitive tasks are taken care of on your behalf.

Code Quality:  Generally, we treasure the quality of third-party Ruby on Rails code to be significantly higher than Node JS or PHP web framework equivalents.

Test Automation — The Ruby community stands tall in testing and test automation. It is believed that it has precious value in helping to deliver good quality software and is one of the reasons the Ruby libraries are so preferable in the market.

Responsible Developers: We tend to find Ruby developers are more closely aligned around the strategy of responsible development. Anyone who is willing to develop a  small, to communicate well, tackle vertical slices and to write simple code over the smart code then one can find their project takes up a better shape with Rails engagement.

Productivity: Ruby on Rails is a powerful and succinct language, which when combined with the third party libraries, which allows one to enhance development features incredibly fast. Experts say it’s one of the most productive programming languages around the Globe.

Next Generation — Ruby on Rails seems to be the language of choice for a number of popular online code schools, such as Makers Academy, Steer and CodeCademy. 

The Process of programming is incredibly faster than other prevailing frameworks and languages,it’s because of the object-oriented tendency of Ruby and availability of a huge pool of open source codes within their own community.

Rails is an asset for Rapid Application Development (RAD), as the framework makes it easy to adopt changes.

Ruby on Rails code is readable and mostly self-documenting. It boosts productivity, as there is minimal need to write down a new documentation, makes it easier for other developers to have a ride on existing projects.

Pitfalls of Ruby on Rails!

It crawls!

One of the most frequent quarrel against RoR is its ‘slow’ runtime speed, which makes harder to rate your applications. While it’s true that other top frameworks and environment are somewhat faster than RoR, it is unlikely that your application will witness performance bottlenecks, unless it has a user base comparable to such large websites as Twitter.

In most cases,  your RoR application will face would be linked to the database architecture or web server and the proficiency of your developers rather than RoR itself. Performance issues should be still kept in mind, though. Twitter, for example, struggled to enhance RoR’s performance that deteriorated after the social media network became very fashionable. Although Twitter did not abandon RoR completely, it was forced to replace certain core communication components and server daemons with Scala solutions.

It has no Documents to refer!

 It can be hard to find good documentation for the less popular “gems”, and for libraries which make heavy use of mixins. Developers often end up finding the test suite playing the role of documentation and they have to rely on it to understand the behavior of the written code. This aspect isn’t bad in its essence, as the test suite should be the most up-to-date representation of the system; however, it can still be agitating having to leap into the code,  sometimes the written documentation pulls down our work much quicker. That’s why it is sometimes mentioned among the disadvantages of Ruby on Rails.

 It befriends Multithreading!

Rails supports multi-threading, though some of the IO (Input/Output) libraries do not allow, as they keep hold of the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) for a quality execution. If developers don’t keep visiting frequently requests will get queued up behind the active request and can leas way to performance issues.  The knock-on effect of this is your application ends up consuming more compute resources than necessary, which can increase your infrastructure costs.

To sum up, Rails is a huge web app framework with a large number of built-in features. It can be used to create either small or large apps, but it tends to use more memory and resources than the other frameworks and performance can be a bit slower.

Greetings from Sumanas technologies! 

We have created stunning applications with Ruby on Rails, clustered with driving features and functions to render wonderful performances!

Take a look at our dazzling web development services on a go…!