The Advantages and Disadvantages of Ruby on Rails
What is Ruby on Rails?
Rails is a server-side web-application framework written in Ruby that is designed to create applications according to the model-view-controller (MVC) framework. It is extremely versatile, as it can facilitate the use of JSON, XMP, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Rails can be used just as an API or for both the front and back-end. You can also incorporate Object Relational Mapping for logic and data. Many popular sites such as AirBnB, Hulu, Square, SoundCloud, and GitHub use Ruby on Rails. So, what are the pros and cons of Ruby on Rails? What makes it amazing and what can be improved? Let’s take a look.
Pros
Easy to Use!
Many seasoned developers argue that Ruby is one of the best beginner-friendly languages to learn. Originally, Ruby was designed to create games. Ruby reads just like English, which makes it easier to understand for beginners. Not only that, but Ruby is a very flexible programming language. It will be easier to solve problems because you can implement different methods to find the solution. One of the most important concepts in Rails is the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) mantra. With this logic, Rails ensures that programmers have a clear separation of concern when writing code.
Strong Community
As you learn to program, you’ll quickly realize how powerful and important it is to be belong to such a constantly growing and evolving community. The Ruby community is full of support, with developers available to give help when needed. According to CodeMentor, Ruby has the 8th largest StackOverflow community, the 5th largest meetup community, and is the 3rd most tagged language on GitHub. With that being said, it’s clear that Ruby is a great language for beginners! Ruby’s ecosystem includes something called “gems” that are basically libraries of code that can be incorporated into your project. Looking for something specific? Odds are, the Ruby community has already created it!
Flexibility
Ruby on Rails can be used with other popular frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue. Rails will still be used in the backend, adding the flexible option to use any frontend framework you like.
Cons
Slow Runtime Speed
Arguably, Ruby on Rails’ runtime can be a bit slow in comparison to other environments and frameworks. Even Twitter struggled to with Rails’ speed after the social networking site increased in popularity. It hasn’t fully abandoned RoR, but it has had to make some replacements in order to boost speed. A slow runtime will indeed make it difficult to scale your application if using Ruby on Rails.
Costly Mistakes
Be careful! Inexperienced RoR developers might make mistakes that will have adverse effects on the performance and functionality of the application. In the long run, it might be difficult to fix because RoR is created with components that rely on each other.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that Ruby on Rails will get the job cleanly and effectively. It’s a great web framework to use and you can’t go wrong if you choose to RoR for your next project. It’s open-sourced, and constantly being updated by a community of dedicated developers. Hopefully, this article helped you gain some insight on the advantages and disadvantages of RoR.
