7 Reasons Startups Should Choose Ruby on Rails For Prototyping
Ruby on Rails advertises itself as being optimized for programmer happiness. Every day more and more developers get convinced to use it. Do the framework features that lure the techies translate into a valuable product for stakeholders? Let’s look at most important qualities of Ruby on Rails that make it the best choice for your MVP.
Emphasis On Productivity
At each step of development, Ruby on Rails promotes effective ways to build the application. And the most effective way is to not write code at all. Many essential components can be generated instead of being coded. Do you want to allow your customers to post comments on your website? Great, let’s generate the Comment model! Should the admin be able to moderate the comments? OK, just generate a separate CRUD panel for those comments.
Ruby on Rails is built around many proven conventions. There are many ready solutions for common problems. Developers know where such-and-such a file should be. Both junior and senior devs are familiar with the concepts of callback or migration. Well-known patterns guarantee good software design. Therefore the code is easier to maintain in the future, which reduces the costs. Also it’s easier for new developers to join an existing team.
Large and growing community of developers
Ruby on Rails used to be cool. It used to sit in its small niche while enterprise frameworks ruled the Earth. Some of those enterprise dinosaurs are already extinct. Meanwhile, Rails has matured along with its growing community.
Today the framework has its own 10-year history. This might seem like a burden in a world of software where everything deteriorates with time. With each milestone Rails contributors utilize their expertise to refresh the toolset and keep it state-of-the-art web app framework.
This process invites professionals to help grow the software. The decade has welcomed a lot of experienced programmers. There are many senior developers with more than 5 years of background in Rails. They often share their knowledge with the community. Newcomers have lots of materials to learn from — books, online courses, message boards. Ruby coders are committed to writing quality code. By contributing to Open Source projects they establish a work culture and learn how to collaborate.
Huge ecosystem so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel
While programming, there are few issues that no one else faced before. In the Ruby world, if you need something, there’s already a gem for it. Gems are reusable programs and libraries that are developed and publicly shared by community members.
Web application developers can choose from this gigantic collection. There are gems for user authentication, another one for PDF generation, CSV import, file uploads with S3 support, image processing and many more.
Lot of production-ready extensions also allow you to integrate 3rd party services in your project. Just drop in the extension and you can sign-in via Facebook, process payments using Stripe or update documents in Google Drive.
Supported by multiple PaaS providers
Platform as a Service provides a no-hassle way to deploy and manage web applications. There is no hardware infrastructure to maintain and no need for a sysadmin. You pay only for the resources you actually use.
Ruby on Rails is supported by most popular PaaS providers like Heroku, Engine Yard or Shelly Cloud. If you need to show your application to the world, there’s no easier way than to just push it to the cloud. The time will come when you’ll need more computational power. With a click, you can scale a one-cpu server into a cluster of several multi-cpu machines.
It’s easy to write an API for your mobile application
Ruby on Rails applications utilize RESTful architecture by default. And RESTful is a well-known paradigm among both mobile and web developers. It allows teams to create APIs that will be easy to talk to from mobile applications.
Combined with built-in support for JSON data format, Rails is perfect for any mobile application that needs a back-end.
Good for Agile projects
Frequent changes to the scope are not uncommon to Agile projects. Rails’ modular design allows to rapidly reflect those changes without sacrificing code quality. With a straightforward deployment process it takes seconds to release the new version. The Product Owner can give instant feedback and be closer to the team.
The framework puts a strong emphasis on writing automated tests. These tests help ensure that no bugs are introduced with the modification of the code. They act as guidelines so there is no need to maintain separate documentation.
Ruby is designed to make programmers happy
It’s good to keep programmers happy. They enjoy their work better, are more productive and care about the project.
The Ruby language is beautiful:
3.times do
print 'Ho!'
endEven with no actual programming knowledge, it’s easy to guess what the piece of code does. Ruby feels natural, often looking more like written English than a computer language. Still, it remains powerful and flexible. Writing Ruby code is like communicating with the computer, not just giving it orders.
