Ruby on Rails is a web development framework that is very popular among startups. The purpose of this blog post is to shed light on various aspects of Ruby on Rails that make it the first choice of the startups.
Ruby on Rails Benefit 1: Rapid Development within Budget
A Startup needs to undertake tremendous amount of development with a very little time and budget. Ruby on Rails adds to this benefit. The framework is guided by principles that are meant for speed and simplicity. The development time is really fast. Using other languages may take 1.5 – 2 times more than that of Ruby on Rails development. Thus, a startup gets significant boost by cutting down time in developing and marketing a high quality service.
Want to know more? We have written a blog on the Ruby on Rails development principles.
All rails have a common structure and when a startup hires an experienced developer, she immediately knows where to find what. Initializers, configs, modules-everything will be at her fingertips immediately. This is very much consistent with the lean structure of a startup. It can hire a developer and she can start coding right away.
Ruby on Rails is a logical choice from budget perspective as well. It is an open source platform that is free by definition. It has lots of free plugins (gems) that adds great benefits to this framework. We will elaborate on the plugins in the following point.
Ruby on Rails Benefit 2: Strong Ecosystem and High Compatibility
Development speed depends on compatibility with the existing ecosystem. Many startups prefer to deploy their apps on a PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider as PaaS significantly lowers initial software adoption cost. Nearly all of them support Ruby on Rails out of the box (Heroku, Engine yard etc). REST API is another buzzword today in web development. Rails incorporates “RESTful Architecture” out of the box. This means startups don’t need to hire someone to implement RESTful code. Rails would ensure that anyway.
We have already mentioned Gems. There are lots of community developed libraries that help development. Our team has worked with many gems including authlogic, devise, omniauth, paperclip, carrierwave, attachment_fu, carrierwave, spreadsheet etc. Gems are extremely handy from time to time.
Ruby on Rails Benefit 3: Symbol of Startup Culture
An attribute of Ruby on Rails development is that it gives you a hint of a company’s work style and culture. A rails developer needs to be stay updated with the web and new technology. It is the nature of the framework to change and evolve rapidly and a RoR developer must keep up with the pace. Facing continues change and development suits with the very essence of a startup.
Our team has extensive experience of working with Rails 3.2 and Ruby 1.9. That hasn’t stopped here. New versions of RoR are already out. Currently we are working with Rails 4.0.x and 4.1. That is how RoR developers have to act. As the framework grows, they have to grow and learn as well.
If you research the job requirements for Ruby on Rails, you will see most are fast growing startups with a varying number of team members. They need people who would grow fast, learn fast and at the same time, ensure high quality. If we look for sites that uses RoR framework we will get many world famous brands. For examples, Twitter, Github, Scribd, Groupon, CrunchBase, Shopify etc are all built with Ruby on Rails. So, choose Ruby on Rails today, if you want to enjoy growth and prospect.
“After researching the market, Ruby on Rails stood out as the best choice. We have been very happy with that decision. We will continue building on Rails and consider it a key business advantage.” – Evan Williams, Creator of Blogger and ODEO Contributor: Mushtahir Aziz Rahman, Business Executive, Nascenia
