Why Ruby On Rails?

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!