In today's world where Startup's are springing up left right
and center, quick time to market and speed is utmost important.The importance
of getting out quickly in front of real customers becomes even more prominent
in the tech world.
The technology choice that you make is one of the key
deciding factors on how quickly you can accommodate the changes in the fast pace
industry. Ruby on Rails has started to become a de-facto choice in the startup
& small business industry for achieving more by doing less.
Ruby on Rails (Rails) is an open source full-stack web
application framework for the Ruby programming language and powerful web
application tool, which helps in, boosting up the speed of development life cycle.
Also it is designed keeping the developer happiness in mind
and sustainable productivity. It leverages best practices out of the box and
adheres to Model-View-Controller(MVC) design pattern. It fosters writing clean
code by favoring convention over configuration.
The simplicity of the language helps developers from other
world like Java, .NET, php and others, get upto speed quickly. The optimistic
attitude of the language that lays complete power in the hands of developers
makes it even more admirable to them. An example of that is the monkey patching
feature of the language that allows a develoeper to open any class and add or
modify the behavior of the class.
Interestingly developers who chose Rails are always looking
to simplify and better things, which makes them more open to try new tricks and
languages.They seem to not reinvent the wheel each time and adhere to the best
practices to build scalable applications. Keeping things simpler and making
them better is core to the community and this can be clearly seen by their
acceptance of haml, coffee script, saas and more.
Rails is light weight too. Unlike several other matured
languages, Rails future releases cares less about being backward compatible and
thinks more about accomplishing the solution more effectively and elegantly.
Rails also has a very active community. Try posting a
question when you are stuck and the community will respond back very quickly
trying to get you past that problem. This is very important in the software
industry. People in the community does good karma with no expectations what so
ever and you have equal opportunity to give back to the community as well.
Learning Rails is easy too. There are zillions of tutorials
available over the net. However screencasts are the most helpful. They are
short - 10-15 minutes and you can quickly learn a new better way of doing
something every day.RailsCasts is prominent screencast tutorial. Another great
resource is Michael Hartl's 'Ruby on Rails Tutorial' tutorial.
To add to that, there are also several great books available
for learning Ruby on Rails. 'Agile Web Development with Rails' is a highly
recommended book. It quickly talks about Ruby and jump starts you to build a
real application. By the end of the book, you would have built a real application
and feel more confident about doing more work using Rails.
Rails promotes automated testing. It fosters test driven
development and has several gems available to help you get a head start on unit
testing your code and also allows you to take the BDD route.
There are gazillions of gems available which will do a lot
of your work auto-magically. Ruby tool box, https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/,
helps you get started on it quickly. Github is another place to find pre built
functionalities in form of ruby gems or rails applications. The gems and
libraries can help you speed up your work and helps you avoid re-inventing a
wheel and creating bugs. You could pick the time tested libraries in form of
gems or plugins off the shelf and plug them into your code base.
There are also several Ruby and Rails events that
takes place all over the world. Ruby conferece is prominent almost every where.
Local ruby meet ups also help gets developers upto speed quickly.
For any suggestions and further views on Ruby on Rails you can visit at http://www.idyllic-software.com/ .
Do leave your valuable comments!