As startup CTOs know well, the success of any venture strongly relies on the ability to efficiently bring an idea to life, to turn a concept into reality. From rapid MVP deployment to new product versions and continuous value delivery. This involves managing a team and making critical decisions, such as tech design planning, product architecture, and development platform selection. The focus of this article is precisely to help you with these decisions by demonstrating the benefits of Ruby on Rails (RoR) and why it is the best option in a fast-paced and highly demanding startup environment.
And we’re not alone in this appraisal: the creators of Netflix, Airbnb, Shopify, Groupon, Basecamp, and many other successful startups trust this technology to build their products. In fact, the ease and speed of creating apps powered by Ruby on Rails drastically decreases the time it takes a startup to hit the market. The benefits of Ruby on Rails are evident — so let’s start from the beginning.
Ruby on Rails is an open-source framework developed in the Ruby programming language. It allows users to write less code while accomplishing more than many other programming languages. Rails is a framework, a collection of libraries, modules, and structures that help build web applications. Ruby on Rails combines the features of both platforms and opens the gateway to a whole lot of new functionalities.
Rails is an example of opinionated software. It assumes that there is a “best” way to do things — “The Rails Way” — resulting in a tremendous boost in productivity. Its philosophy includes two principles that also represent the major benefits of Ruby on Rails:
- Don’t Repeat Yourself — DRY is a principle of software development that states that “Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system”. By not writing the same information over and over again, the code is more maintainable, more extensible, and less buggy.
- Convention Over Configuration — Rails has opinions about the best way to do many things in a web application and defaults to this set of conventions, rather than require that you specify minutiae through endless configuration files.
On average, Ruby on Rails teams build applications 30–40% faster than others. Fantastic, right? Ruby on Rails unshackles developers from the tedious parts of coding, freeing them up to focus on business features and app logic.
Let’s take a look at the key benefits of Ruby on Rails to see why it’s so startup-friendly and loved by CTOs and developers:
- Saves time and money: As a framework, Ruby on Rails comes with many ready-made plugins, libraries, and modules that allow building an app without writing boilerplate code. Plus, developers follow standardized file storage and programming conventions that keep projects structured and readable, requiring less time to update code in the future. Moreover, it is based on a Model–View–Controller design pattern that facilitates parallel development and allows teams to work efficiently — up to three times faster than with other design patterns. At the end of the day, all this means cost-effectiveness ;)
- It’s open-source: Open Source Software (OSS) is built by enthusiasts in a collaborative manner and distributed for free, with no licensing costs. By being an OSS, Rails receives contributions and is supported by thousands of developers worldwide. This means a huge community that is continually improving codeand willing to help fix any issues. Furthermore, if you need a given piece of functionality, there’s a good chance that someone else has already built something similar, and there’s no need to build it from scratch. Once again, this community collaboration saves time and money.
- Scalability: When your app goes big, it needs to cope with increasing amounts of data. The architecture of Ruby on Rails ensures modularity, which means the possibility to divide the system into engines, modules, and gems. It employs a load balancer and can provide proper performance levels during the processing of increased request loads with proper optimization. Shopify is a great example — its system handles up to 4 million requests per second!
- Easy code maintenance and flexibility: Rails is recognized for its predictability and stability. It takes less time for a new developer to understand the old code or for the old developer to pick up from where they left, which translates into quicker and easier project maintenance. Ruby is a flexible language because it allows users to freely alter, remove, or redefine sections.
- Security as a top priority: Ruby on Rails takes security very seriously, including features to protect application makers from common issues like CSRF, Script Injection, SQL Injection, and the like. And there is always a large developer community ready to keep RoR up-to-date and test the security of plugins and applications prior to release. It’s also possible to select from numerous dedicated libraries like brakeman, akami, and so on to protect an app from any potential vulnerability.
Now it’s your turn:
Start leveraging all the benefits of Ruby on Rails in your startup.
You can count on Runtime Revolution to be your product development team specialists. We are experts in this technology with a great track record of successful projects for startups. Let’s talk and build your next project together!