Ruby on Rails- The Road Ahead…

Ruby on Rails is an open-source web application framework for the Ruby programming language. The growing demand for Ruby on Rails has been driven by successful companies who benefit from the speed and agility of building applications in Rails, which results in increased productivity and company growth.

One such example is that of freelancify. com creator James Fend. His article How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify is a compelling story on how easy and useful Ruby on Rails is for coders. Rails has become “the” web technology for web startups.

Does the Future Look Good for RoR?

Yes, definitely the future of RoR looks good. But, there are some issues that have to be corrected immediately for the language to hit back in full swing. Detractors of RoR have some common issues with the language

Enterprise capabilities and scalability

The EJB2 debacle is probably the worst thing that could happen to RoR development. As it is now not considered to be enterprise ready due to the same issue. But the fact is, RoR has actually come out with fine colors with its enterprise level capabilities by reducing cost and delivering quality software. Here are some of the capabilities of Rails that can address the needs of an enterprise app: 

1. Agility/Flexibility

   Ruby on Rails can provide rapid feedback loop that can save time and money. It provides a preferred framework, preferred tools and set of libraries or applications to do quick iterations and is able to deliver on time. In short, the many functionalities provided by RoR make it highly scalable and flexible.

2. Quick Prototype Development

   The process of programming is much faster than with other frameworks and languages due to the object-oriented nature of Ruby and because of Rails guiding principle such as Convention over Configuration (CoC), which reduces the amount of code that needs to be written.  

3. Performance

   There has been a lot of updates already on Rails that optimize and improve its performance. New features such as the Asset Pipeline have been added to augment web site performance and there are many more features to be added in the near future.

  4.  Security

Rails as a framework has great built-in security and elegant solutions to protect passwords and custom data. On user, there are a number of options,techniques and tools for encrypting data in Rails. 

The other problem some people have with Ruby on Rails is its scalability. Ruby lovers consider the issue of scalability not worthy of being called an “issue”, as RoR provides multiple options for scalability.

These are- horizontal and vertical. Horizontal scalability means scaling “out” by adding more boxes next to the existing ones. While vertical scalability means scaling “up” by adding more memory, more CPUs, faster disks, and so forth, into the existing boxes.

 So, for RoR to come into the limelight, established businesses have to consider taking it up for developing their applications as, getting stuck with the “startup” tag wont help the language down the road.

On the other hand, startups can boost the use of Rails by creating killer apps and solutions based on the RoR platform, to make it widely accepted. Ultimately, the factor that probably keeps more developers away from Rails than any other is the learning curve.

If you’ve already been working with one technology, it’s always more time-consuming in the short-term to switch to a different one. And if you’re only working on simple sites, it may not be worth the investment.

But if you want to advance your skills and become as productive as you can be, you owe it to yourself to learn Ruby on Rails. You’ll need to invest a few months of study and practice to become proficient, but from that point forward you’ll be building better sites more quickly and having more fun doing it.