December 13, 2015, marks the 10-year anniversary of the Rails 1.0 release, and we are excited! The landscape of the web has changed quite a bit in that time, but Rails has kept pace and is still giving development teams a level of productivity and happiness that is second to none. With so many choices available, however, some may wonder if Rails is still relevant.
Here are the top four reasons why Ruby on Rails is still our favorite web framework:
1. Ruby
The Ruby language itself is the primary reason to use choose Rails for your next web project. Ruby is such a terse, yet expressive language that any developer will quickly fall in love. Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka “Matz”), the creator of Ruby, said that it was “designed to make programmers happy”—and that it does. In the introduction to his book Confident Ruby, Avdi Grimm used the following example to demonstrate the simplicity the language provides:
3.times do puts "Hello, Ruby world!" end
Pretty cool syntax, right? Ruby version 2.2 provided major performance gains, and it will no doubt continue to improve with each release.
2. Maturity
Over the last 10 years, Ruby on Rails has gained serious traction and is in use by companies large and small. It may no longer be the “hip” new kid on the block, but it has proven itself to be a stable platform that focuses on convention, best practices and security. Instead of worrying if your framework is going to shift from beneath your feet, you can focus on building your own great product.
3. Community
Another awesome feature that comes with Ruby on Rails is the community. With an ever-growing pool of developers, Rails has an active community that is responsive to upcoming industry trends and any issues that arise. From very early on, the Rails community has spearheaded best practices in software development and has shown a great commitment to knowledge sharing through blogs, user groups and conferences.
4. Productivity
Developer productivity is another huge win with Ruby on Rails. Designed with the “convention over configuration” mindset, Rails doesn’t bog developers down with repetitive boilerplate setup work. Another great asset is the RubyGems package manager, which makes thousands of prebuilt libraries freely available. Typical libraries may include help with user authentication, credit card integration, file uploads and more.
At Copy and Code, we think Ruby on Rails is the perfect fit for many web applications. If you’re ready to get started with Ruby on Rails for your next project or if you need help with an existing one, don’t hesitate to contact us to learn more.