The benefits of Ruby on Rails

In the article What is Ruby on Rails for we presented its usefulness, especially since the creation of the Rails framework, as well as some companies that use it in France and around the world

Here we are going to list the qualities of this framework that we particularly like at Capsens.

Development speed

Ruby is clear, simple, logical and has a lean code base. Its philosophy based on code readability and the application of the DRY principle (Don't Repeat Yourself) makes it possible to accelerate the speed of development and increase its maintainability. Add Rails and you'll see how It helps developers save time during development and to focus on solving complex problems. Simply because less code means less time spent writing it while the functionality remains the same.

Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in reducing entry barriers to programming. Powerful web applications that previously would have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days.

Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly.

In fact, this is why most web development bootcamps, such as The Wagon, focus their training on Ruby on Rails.

Besides, I take advantage of this to rPaying tribute to the Wagon which significantly increased the popularity of Ruby on Rails in France and around the world. We have several members of our team who have been trained there, and they are all fans of their experience there!

Profitability

As can be seen from the previous point, development time is money (especially at a time when developers are well paid). The longer development takes, the more expensive it is. Because of How quickly Rails websites can be created and edited, less money is spent creating and maintaining them. Of course this is provided that the application is properly designed and that its development process is correct.

In addition, Ruby on Rails is open source, which means no license fees. But this is not exceptional because today open-source languages are the norm.

Flexibility

The framework Rails is very flexible and allows websites to be adapted to various updates related to innovations in business processes. In case you miss out on some features in the future, there are separate modules for that. Additionally, Ruby allows you to remove various items or redefine them as needed. Likewise, individual parts of a program or application can be freely changed and extended later.

It is an incredibly expressive and flexible language that allows a problem to be solved in multiple ways, giving Ruby on Rails developers a lot of freedom and opportunities to find the best solution for a project.

RoR projects are easy to learn

The Ruby code is readable and largely self-documented. Spared from the need to write more documentation than they absolutely need, developers can take on existing projects with almost no specific training. Additionally, over 90% of Ruby web applications written use Rails. This means that RoR provides all sorts of integrations to meet project requirements.

Each project is well-structured, so a new developer will get project details quickly from day one. This means that turnover hurts less because Onboarding simpler. Likewise, the growth in the number of developers on a project is facilitated by this quality of RoR.

Massive resource and community

There are a large number of Ruby on Rails solutions ready to use in the public domain (the famous “gems”), most of which have already been tested by someone else, reducing the need to develop something from scratch. Moreover, at Capsens, we have made several of them. that we have open-sourced.

The big and friendly community where Ruby on Rails developers help each other out, announce new projects, and discuss everything related to the framework, is not only useful for coders, but is also beneficial for businesses. In case of difficulties, it helps to find the best solutions to solve your problems. At present, There are 1,800,000 gems that any Ruby developer can use to improve their application. The widespread use of Ruby applications and tools means that you can easily integrate other services into RoR-based products.

Scalability

For a long time, Ruby on Rails has been known for its scalability issues, and not without reason. For example, the performance of the same programs written in Java and RoR can be very different, especially considering the high efficiency of Java when it comes to multi-threaded applications. However, Rails 6 released in 2020 solved the majority of Rails' scalability issues. Rails 6 is considered scalable by default.

Today, the massive use of RoR by very important companies and with resilience requirements such as Airbnb, Doctolib or Github shows that language has greatly exceeded these limits.

Data protection

Ruby on Rails offers excellent security to developed projects. When using RoR tools, SQL injections and XSS attacks are excluded, all input parameters are blocked by default, output variables in models are also blocked. Successive Rails updates tend to be even more secure: Rails 7 introduces BDD encryption for example.

And security breaches are always fixed in a very short time so that it becomes very difficult for a developer to make a security mistake (unless they intentionally shot themselves in the foot).

The teams responsible for developing the Rails framework have put a lot of thought into its data protection capabilities. Among other things, RoR contains password encryption and credit card details.

Maintainability

The aspect stability is extremely important for every business. Ruby on Rails development generally uses The TDD approach (test-driven development) and the toolkit supports extended testing capabilities. This means that solutions created with Ruby on Rails are stable and maintainable (this requires little maintenance time). The framework itself is also covered by automatic tests, making it reliable.

Unlike other frameworks, RoR has excellent automated testing tools, which speeds up the transition of the project from the “the program is written” stage to the “the program works without errors” stage. And it is often this transition that takes the longest in the implementation of almost any project.

Startups and Scaleups

Naturally, profitability, speed, scalability, access to the broadest knowledge base, and other factors are all advantages of RoR that give startups and small and medium-sized businesses a competitive edge. Startups and developing businesses choose Ruby on Rails services because they allow them to compete with big businesses.

“Rails has done more for startups than a bunch of venture capitalists. Rails has had an incredible impact on the startup ecosystem.” Eric Ries, the promoter of Lean Startups

AsRuby on Rails web agency with most of our projects developed in RoR, we agree with this message;)

The future of RoR

The important thing is that although Ruby on Rails is over 15 years old, it is constantly being developed to meet emerging business needs. The current stable version of Ruby is 3.1. It exceeds the previous one (2.0) by being 3 times faster, with higher memory usage, static typing and new features such as Ractors (multithreading) and schedulers. These new features help keep it up to date and competitive.

Not to mention what happens in the longer term thanks to big companies like Shopify investing heavily in R&D for Ruby on Rails.