7 Reasons to Use Ruby on Rails in 2023
Ruby on Rails (RoR) is a popular web development framework that has been rolling along for more than a decade now. Despite all the new “blazingly fast” or “hip” frameworks that seem to pop up every month nowadays, this classic framework — running on an all but forgotten language Ruby, still continues to be the go-to for many developers and software companies worldwide.
In this article, we will be looking over seven reasons why Ruby on Rails still is a great choice for software companies and individuals in 2023.
1. Productivity and Time to market
Perhaps the most important reason developers and companies still rely on Rails is its rock-solid productivity and fast development times.
Rails was one of the pioneers in web frameworks — focusing on developer productivity more than trying to win the game of building applications that may or may not be a few milliseconds faster at runtime.
Sure, Ruby and Rails might not offer the “blazingly” fast performance that some other languages and frameworks do, but developers that use Rails get a LOT more done in a LOT less time.
Think about it — would you rather have 5–6 devs working on a dumpster fire of a “trendy” codebase with every single one redefining the best practices, or would you have a couple of Rails developers delivering features on time while maintaining a high test coverage and writing maintainable code?
Rails devs are generally more productive due to the simple syntax of Ruby, the pragmatic architecture of the framework, the strict conventions used, and the power generators that can scaffold APIs and services with a few simple commands while still offering all the flexibility of a modern web framework.
2. Convention over Configuration
The main philosophy behind Rails that still differs it from other frameworks on the market is its Convention over Configuration approach.
Rails make a default set of assumptions for the developer so that every person on the team conforms to best practices. If we follow the configuration set up by the Rails team, writing readable and maintainable code becomes a default rather than an additional thing to think about every step of the way.
This is in fact also the not-so-hidden hidden meaning behind the framework’s name. You have to get on the Railway if you want to go lightning fast!
3. Performance
While Rails historically had a reputation for performance and scaling issues (mostly due to Twitter moving away from an old version of Rails), the same cannot be said for the newer versions of the framework.
Throughout time, Rails and the language Ruby itself have had huge performance boosts, due to which it can compete at the level of, if not outshine the competition around it. Scalability is a main focus of the framework, as the official website itself lets you know -— Rails scales from Hello World to IPO
Variants of the language have been built to run on JVM, .NET framework, etc — though the original CRuby implementation is still the most popular.
Today, Rails continues to power high-traffic services like GitHub, Shopify, Gitlab, Cloudfactory, Airbnb, Kickstarter, Twitch, and much more. Ruby powers Stripe, which facilitates millions of transactions each day.
4. The Zen of Ruby
Ruby is perhaps one of the most developer-friendly languages. It isn’t just simple, it’s elegant.
It was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) with one goal in mind — to make programming as natural and expressive as possible.
While Ruby is a very easy language to wrap your head around, one shouldn’t treat it as an inferior language. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
Ruby remains one of the simplest purely object-oriented languages, and the flexibility of metaprogramming means that you can create your own Domain Specific Language (DSL) as well, which is very powerful.
5. The “Gem” ecosystem
If there is something you want to do inside Rails, chances are there is already a Gem for it.
Gems in Ruby are prepackaged libraries that allow developers to easily pull in new functionalities without writing much code.
Need user authentication? Devise will give you auth, validation emails and much more. Need ecommerce functionality? Solidus, and a myriad of gems are here to bring all that functionality in a few simple gem installs.
Because Rails is one of the main use cases of Ruby, most gems come with generators that generate necessary code for you, which you can simply customize to your liking. As a developer, you get to spend more time building out features instead of reinventing the wheel for the millionth time.
6. Stability and security
Rail is a stable framework — in fact, it is one of the most mature web frameworks around today. This means that it has been battle tested thoroughly over the years.
Security is baked right into the framework. This makes Rails a reliable and secure choice for applications dealing in sensitive data in areas like Enterprise and Ecommerce.
If that wasn’t enough to console you, before each major version release, new versions of Rails are first battle-tested on sites like Basecamp, HEY (both run by DHH, the creator of Rails), and Github, some very high-traffic web services around today.
7. Community Support
Ruby is on a steady trend, unaffected by market hype — sharp peaks and valleys in popularity. It is supported by a great community, and the community around Rails is especially very popular.
Because of the philosophy of Matz, Ruby’s creator and core maintainer, people in the Ruby community (Rubyists) are also a lot friendlier than others. In fact, is a popular saying that goes around in the community: “Matz is nice and so we are nice”.
The Rails GitHub repository has over 4.7k contributors alone, which is double that of other projects like Django, Express, and the like. Over 2 million people have used Rails through its Github repo as well, signifying its underdog popularity.
Conclusion
In all, Rails continues to be a top choice for individual developers and software companies alike. It has a reputation for being a Swiss army knife for developers and is as popular for startups as it is for enterprises.
Although picking a framework isn’t the end-all-be-all for building web applications, Ruby on Rails allows teams to focus more on satisfying business needs instead of coding down commonly used functionality. The conventions surrounding the framework also make writing readable, maintainable, and scalable code a default rather than an additional step.
