The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Ruby

omid Programming September 13, 2021

In this Article I want to talk about the The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Ruby?

Short History of Ruby on Rails

Ruby, the programming language, was named after a valuable gemstone by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto in 1995.

Ruby or Rails was launched in 2004 and immediately caught public attention. The success and popularity lasted for more than three years. Today Ruby on Rails has become the framework of choice for Ruby.

What is Ruby on Rails?

Ruby on Rails, also known as RoR and Rails is a web framework that is one of the most popular tools in web development. Just like most application frameworks, RoR was built with the Ruby programming language for a specific task its creator had during his work in a web application development company.

Ruby on Rails was built on the basis of the Ruby programming language which was originally meant to be a technology for fast software development. That is why Ruby on Rails is often call a “startup technology”. It was created to guarantee quick launches.

Rails was the first framework of its kind. It operates on the MVC (Model-View-Controller) principle:

Model is responsible for relationships between objects and the database.
View is templates (commonly made up of a blend of HTML and Ruby code) that are utilized to build the data users of web applications.
Controller binds together models and view.

So lets learn the Advantages of Ruby

Advantages of Ruby on Rails

Time efficiency
A great number of helpful tools and libraries
Huge and active community
Strong adherence to standards
Next Generation

Time efficiency

Although it is relatively easy to learn the basics of this framework, it will take some time for you to unlock its true potential. However, if you’re ready to invest some time in this. You will definitely be amazed at how fast and effective you’ve become.

Furthermore, there are hundreds of tools that can both accelerate and simplify your overall coding experience. As well as spare your time from simple, yet time-consuming tasks.

Basically, this means that you can make more money in the same amount of time. That’s probably why there are so many schools, online and offline courses that are dedicated to Ruby on Rails. This also means that the community is getting even bigger – which means there will be even more efficient and helpful tools!

A great number of helpful tools and libraries

There are hundreds of different helpful community-created “gems” and libraries that you can use as a part of your own software. However, you can find even more helpful tools among them. They influence not the content of your code, but your software design experience as a whole.

Some of them can help you in debugging, some are a great help in optimization, and some are related to the testing stage of your work.

Huge and active community

There is a huge community of RoR developers on GitHub. And, it is really active – there are many snippets of software with specific functions. You can easily use these snippets, better known as “gems”, as a basis for your own project – so you can focus on more difficult tasks. Plus, this means that you can always ask for help if you’re just getting started.

There have been more than 5000 contributors to the Rails code and the stats are growing.

Strong adherence to standards

One of RoR’s advantages is a strong backing of web standards for every part of an application, from the user interface to data transfer.

Applications that are made with Ruby on Rails are expected to follow established software design paradigms, such as “coding by convention” (developer needs to specify the app features that are unconventional), “don’t repeat yourself” (encouragement to avoid code duplication and to create abstractions instead) and “active record pattern” (specific way of accessing data in the database).

Next Generation

Ruby on Rails seems to be the language of choice for a number of the popular online code schools, such as Makers Academy, Steer and CodeCademy. This should mean an increase in talented programmers joining the Ruby community over the coming years.

Disadvantages of Ruby on Rails

Of course, just as with any other programming language or framework, there are some negative aspects to RoR, and pitfalls that you can fall into during the development process.

Shortage of flexibility
Continuous evolvement
Performance time
Price of a mistake
Active Record

Shortage of flexibility

When it comes to basic tasks and features, RoR is almost unchallenge. However, because there is a lot of default, set objects, there is not a lot of room for creativity. So, before you make your decision about the framework you want to use for a particular project. You need to think about its basic elements and whether they are standard or more unique.

Continuous evolvement

It is hard to say where you should put this point in the list of pros and cons of Ruby on Rails and Ruby language. Obviously, when something changes for the better, it’s great, and it’s a natural process, especially for a language with such a big and vocal community. However, it is something that can be very difficult to adjust to, especially for newcomers and beginners.

In addition, the overwhelming changes happen not only to the framework itself but to the tools and libraries developed by the community. Not only do they improve and add new features but new ones are constantly being created. You definitely need to be a part of the community to be up-to-date on everything all the time.

Performance time

This con of RoR is always debate and it is a subject for discussion and comparison with other web application frameworks. The boot time of the framework is quite long, especially when you work with a massive project, but does it also concern the runtime speed? Well, a lot of developers would argue that this is not the case for apps with proper optimization.

However, if you compare the waiting time with other frameworks such as Node.js, you will definitely see the difference. However, this difference is not that significant . It can definitely be overlook due to all the great stuff Rails has to offer.

Price of a mistake

The price of a mistake in developing with Ruby on Rails is heavily connect to the performance time. If you’re able to be thorough and pay attention to all the small details during the development. Ruby on Rails will definitely be your helpful friend.

However, if you make some wrong judgment during the beginning of the development. It can easily slow down your whole application significantly, cause problems with the connection between different parts of your software, and lead to unintended consequences.

Active Record

AR is use heavily within the Ruby on Rails world and is a hard dependency for many of the RubyGems. Although we think it’s a great design pattern, the biggest drawback we see is that your domain becomes tightly coupled to your persistence mechanism. This is far from ideal and can lead to bad architecture decisions. There are many ways to work around this, some of which are included in this 7 Patterns to Refactor Fat ActiveRecord Models article. We would like to see Rails become less reliant on Active Record.

Conclusion

There are use-cases for pretty much every programming language referenced and you’ll find advocates of them all. If you are delivering a new application for the web, then we would advise you to develop it in Ruby, Python, NodeJS or GoLang.

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