With the ever-increasing importance of attractive business websites, there has been a dramatic surge in the demand for effective web development frameworks. And it’s here that Ruby on Rails fits into the picture with great impact. As a highly scalable and flexible web development framework, Rails makes your web development project highly affordable. That’s not all; this particular web development framework also offers opportunities for swift development and improved performance.

However, web developers will require considering quite a few significant aspects while using Ruby on Rails. There is no denying the cost-effectiveness or numerous other benefits offered by this particular framework. At the same time, it’s also imperative to know when and where to use Ruby on Rails.

Here’s a guide for all those passionate web developers out there.

Projects demanding Ruby on Rails

If you wish to create a customer-friendly, sales-oriented, or social participation sites, Rails will turn out to be the best solution. Check out the following categories, and see of Rails is an ideal option for you.

1.      Membership sites

If you are into building social networking sites or social participation platforms, Ruby on Rails will emerge as the greatest option. With a unique range of plug-ins, Rails will help you combat every critical social networking site.

2.      Ecommerce sites

Ecommerce platforms depend on two crucial aspects. In simple words, your ecommerce development project will rely on two significant approaches. High sales and effective customer engagement are the two most important factors in this context.

With Ruby on Rails, ecommerce site owners will find a modular approach. The unique features offered by the framework will help developers integrate site functions such as site updates, bulk uploads, custom price algorithms, along with photo cropping features for thumbnail creation.

3.      Content management systems

As one of the highly scalable web development frameworks, Rails allows easy navigation to its users. If your website involves a lot of content creation, uploading, and management, Ruby on Rails will prove to be the best solutions.

4.      Custom database management systems

Digital transformations have led businesses towards embracing innovation. Every new-age entrepreneur today strives hard towards establishing a strong business model. Quite inevitably, that creates the demand for custom database management solutions. Ruby on Rails offers the fastest and most cost-effective way of creating such systems.

When to avoid Rails

In spite of these amazing benefits and unique features, Ruby on Rails fails to meet the requirements of quite a few site development projects. The following conditions will help you know when to avoid Rails.

        I.            Building brochure sites

First-time entrepreneurs have countless things in mind while creating their business websites. Most of them opt for brochure-styled websites capable of offering a lot of information to potential customers. These websites have an attractive appearance and also contain crucial contact information about the company.

      II.            Creating blogging sites

If you wish to integrate blogging as functionality in an extensive internet site, Rails will turn out to be the best solution. But, if it’s a dedicated blogging platform, choosing Ruby on Rails will not be feasible.

Conclusion

We would love to hear your words on this piece about Ruby on Rails. Do write in to us and let us know your thoughts.

Ruby on Rails is among the most important and used programming languages and framework used in millions of websites already. More and more websites are shifting towards this language use in the modern times. Being learned and skilled in this language is an added advantage for a web designer to earn gracious salary.  The model view controller pattern applied in this language is hard to master. Hence professionals who have excelled in this difficult but productive web application framework, definitely have their career rolling at a breakneck speed!

Lucrative skill

The graph depiction of number of ruby developers since 2010 clearly suggests an increasing trend proving that this web development language is here to stay. The mind boggling salaries ranging from $70000- $100000 around the world and with quicker and higher raises is definitely driving more towards learning this ‘cash rich’ skill. Professionals skilled at Ruby are a rare bunch and hence attract high demand and less supply. This is also the reason why they are the ones who rule the web development market.

Showcase a Resume with a bright career scope

Like C or Java, Ruby is a general purpose language, although best known for its web programming capabilities. RoR offers several advantages including rapid development, less of coding and a wide resource of 3^rd party libraries. Companies ranging from startups to established multinationals use Ruby to their end. According to the latest (2016) data from indeed.com, Ruby is positioned among the top 10 programming languages, alongside SQL, Java, C#, C++, Python, PHP and iOS. This ensures that a Ruby certification can help you land up in a range of companies and promise a bright career.

Your Career can take off with Ruby on Rails skills

Making a good, secured website is a preliminary SEO requirement. Hence, eradicating any security flaws is the prerogative of the web developers of RoR.  A bachelor in computer science with the technical skills in various web tools including RoR can definitely bring the job seeker in the limelight.

With RoR enjoying a long run (with no indication of slowing down anytime soon), it makes total sense for a newbie in technology domain to master this language and enhance his/ her skillset. Some of the more essential pointers that a new programmer can focus on include the ways to implement upgrades, release codes and also make database changes.

The web applications development can become less intimidating for the people who know Ruby on Rails. Hence, the people who are at any stage of their career can upgrade their skills and add this wonderful tech skill into their CV to get their careers zooming up. The philosophies of this language like ‘don’t repeat yourself’, ‘convention over configuration’ makes it a practical programming language which requires less coding and hence less repetitions unlike other programming software. This makes Ruby a preferable platform for businesses and consequently a winning addition to your CV!

Over the last decade, the popularity of Ruby on Rails as a web app development solution has always been on the higher end of the graph. Knowledge in Ruby on Rails can land developers into great jobs, projects and lucrative positions in Ruby on Rails development companies. From startups to highly established app development companies, everyone agrees to the same conclusion that Ruby on Rails would be the best choice even when compared to alternatives like Java, Python and others.

So what makes Ruby on Rails so popular?

1.       Handy and versatile

In just 5 lines of code, programmers can choose to take an existing class and overwrite its behavior. While this may seem to be counter intuitive, there is risk in everything. Ruby also makes it much more versatile to draw codes. Ruby does miss out on some features available with newer languages, but all in all, it can be used as a ‘language power continuum’.

2.       Pragmatism

Ruby integrates deep pragmatism into its coding DNA. In collaboration with the other benefits, it has been producing elegant solutions since the last decade. Often referred to as ‘tent’ by programmers, Ruby on Rails doesn’t encourage any level of scripting complications. With Ruby on Rails development, it’s actually more of convention than configuration.

3.       Expressiveness

Using Ruby on Rails is just like studying English. The internal DSL of the language extends with the language’s semantics. With other languages, constructing DSL is always risky as it’s an external addition. With Ruby however, programmers don’t require external parser and yet strike an even balance with the DSL. The platform is perfect to use DSL where it makes good sense and demonstrate self-control. The bottomline of programming in Ruby on Rails is inherent usage of the high quality syntax and smart naming.

4.       The Community

Ruby on Rails is supported by an army of committed programmers who ensure that it stays in the most updated condition. With other languages, one might experience projects simmering down with age but with Ruby, the sparks are retained! A great addition to the language has in fact been its package manager, known to us as RubyGems. Though it was sidetracked for a little while RubyGems found its course and remains unified and acts as a superb resource for bright programmers. There is a provoking synergy between the cool language and its superb community and the pragmatic web framework.

5.       Maturity

When it comes to important decision making, anyone would go for tools that have a proven track record.  Ruby fits the criteria perfectly as it has been around the block for quite some time now and has established several runtimes and interpreters to make it conducive for programmers.

6.       Marketing

Lastly, compared to its younger alternatives, the Ruby site is awesome. Even in the older days, Ruby’s screen cast was breathtaking and one would totally agree to the point that when frameworks are in question, it is best to be in the crowd. Ruby is an obvious choice!

Experts say that the platform gives a perfect solution for the rapidly changing technological environment by speeding up the development processes and saving money and time in the process. These reasons show us why Ruby on Rails remains so popular even after so long.

Bullet is an exciting plugin developed by Richard Huang for Ruby on Rails. It reduces the number of queries made by an application. It was first used in 2009 and since then, it has proved to be a powerful gem that helps monitor Ruby on Rails applications for performance improvements. Bullet seeks several ways to notify problems including JavaScript alerts, XMPP alerts and Growl notifications. Further, it saves its bullet.log statement to trace the exact root of the alert.

Here are some interesting tips to optimize Queries in rails using Bullet.

The traditional method (sans the optimization)

This is the old fashioned method of optimization which was initially used by bullet. This example shows two models; Order and Product, wherein an Order consists of many Products. The code script should be:

In app/controllers/orders_controller.rb

class OrdersController < ApplicationController

def index

@orders = Order.all

end

end

In app/views/orders/index.html.erb

<h1>Orders</h1>

<% @orders.each do |order| %>

  <div>

    <h2><%=link_to order.title, order_path(order)%></h2>

  </div>

  <%order.products.each do |product|%>

     <ul class=”product”>

        <li><%=link_to product.title, product_path(product)%></li>

     </ul>

  <%end%>

<% end %>

Source - http://blog.andolasoft.com/2013/05/3-easy-steps-to-optimize-queries-in-rails-using-bullet.html#

This script would however generate some N+1 query issues, the reason being that we have set the query just once in order to get the orders and then separate each query to fetch the products. These are also the kinds of problems that are quite frequently and easily overlooked by programmers. Also, this is where the “Bullet” gem helps in avoiding the issues.

The gem “Bullet” can be integrated to the query in just three easy steps.

Step 1:

Add “Bullet” get to the Gemfile

/Gemfile.rb

gem 'bullet', '4.6.0', :group => “development”

Run the “bundle install” to install the gem “bullet” in development group

Step 2:

Optimize the configuration setting in the development.rb file

For slowing the “bullet” to change its configuration using the after_initialize block contained in the development.rb file. Set the alert as “true” to get the alarms via the browser.

config.after_initialize do

    Bullet.enable = true

    Bullet.alert = true

    Bullet.bullet_logger = true

    Bullet.console = true

    Bullet.rails_logger = true

  end

Step 3:

Restarting the server

You need to both restart the server and reload the page. After step 2, you would see a JavaScript alert popup in the browser with the detected N+1 query. The alert would contain the file that holds the issue and the suggestions to what could be done to override the problem.

The N+1 query can be simultaneously fixed using the following steps:

In Controller,

lass OrdersController < ApplicationController

  def index

    @orders = Order.includes(:products)

  end

end

After you have changed the statement from “Order all” to “Order.includes’ (:products), you need to call eager loading to fetch the products. The date herein would be fetched using two queries, one to obtain the orders and the other to retrieve the products in the orders.

The gem “bullet” can also point out when we are unnecessarily eager loading.

Benefits of optimization

1. No need to search each line of code to figure out inefficiency in database query
2. Automatic notification / alert messages
3. Prevent inefficient database query like N+1
4. Detect unused eager loading

Computer programming languages are quite the same as our spoken languages. There are several categories and each of these further includes logic based, object oriented, imperative or functional elements. However learning the second language in the same category is quite easier than shifting to a whole new category itself. In most cases however, learning that first language becomes difficult enough.

If you are in the programming and IT development field, you will have idea about Ruby on Rails to a certain extent. RoR is a full-stacked programming framework that integrates both front end and back end designing. It has been the reason why Twitter, Basecamp and 43Things are getting so much attention and scaling up seamlessly in line with their business growth. Even brands like eBay and Amazon are adopting RoR elements in their e-commerce projects for reasons such as versatility, user friendliness and high demand.

In case you need to start on the path to a new programming language then its worth every minute of your time exploring Ruby on Rails. Here are the top 5 reasons why every programmer should learn Ruby on Rails.

1. Easy to learn / beginner friendly
The best thing about Ruby on Rails as a programming language is the cleanliness of code structure. Even a beginner would be able to start picking up the nuances early on. The interaction between front and back end is highly simplified wherein all the elements work in a perfect sync, making the experience enjoyable for the developer. While experienced programmers would be able to easily pick up RoR, it wouldn’t take a lot of time for beginners too. For a newbie, Ruby on Rails is the perfect language to start with.

2. Great for MVP
Ruby on Rails is a highly recommended framework for building prototyping web apps and minimum viable products (MVP). It is highly important for any tech startup to gain customer validation with proof. RoR will help in building quick prototypes and also roughly demonstrate the technical and project management capabilities of the startup within short period of time.

3. Cheap and dynamic
Learning RoR is relatively less expensive, with several free resources, boot camps and short term courses. All you need to invest is some time, depending on your experience level. What you gain is a reflective, dynamic and general purpose programming environment wherein you can lean on the “creative” with least frustration.

4. A dynamic community
Ruby on Rails has a great fan following worldwide. The language offers thousands on free online tutorials, tech help forums and FAQ sites like Stack Overflow. For someone looking to build a career in programming, RoR has helpful meet-up groups where members are bound to have some working solution to any particular RoR related query or doubt.

5. In demand
You not only get to learn a language that is easy but a language that is in high demand. As of now, RoR is the 13th most popular programming language and is experiencing incredible growth in all spheres. Not only among employers and web owners, but RoR is also becoming a commonplace in DevOps roles (Chef and Puppet). RoR supports complex web programming possibilities and is being used in all types of project sizes. It’s really an amazing experience for the developer.

Write in to us and let us know about your experience working on RoR.

With considerable demand for Ruby on Rails driven applications, we are constantly on lookout for professional talent in this domain. Over the last few months there are some specific characteristics we have noticed in the hiring-training-absorption phase that generated good talent in-house. The below listing is based on what we feel are strong factors that will help companies and hiring managers select the right talent for Ruby development.

1. Aligning to company values – if you are a start-up or midsize company you need to be clear about aligning organizational objectives with the candidate’s expectations. If the company culture promotes honest and transparent employee-employer relationship, there is very high chance of the employee performing productively and adding value to the company. Though good paychecks do hold forte in the hiring process, company values matter too.

2. Work environment – Once hired, the Ruby on Rails programmer is bound to come up with his/her own set of ideas (from past experience or recent qualification). The key is to utilize such non-routine ideas to make an existing project better. It might happen that the company has been using Test Unit for rails application testing. However if a new employee justifies the merits of using Rspec or Cucumber for application testing then as a business owner you can give it a shot.

3. Open Source contribution – If the candidate has significant resources put up by way of knowledge, insights or experiments on forums like GitHub, then the candidate is more often than not likely to see through set norms and go above and beyond to deliver excellence to the client. Since programming for the love of it is a key trait that defines our success in cut-throat competition these days, our suggestion would be – hire such early adopters or norm breakers before somebody else does!

4. Basic premise – Do get your candidates checked for sound foundation of basic knowledge such as OOP principles. Many companies have the tendency to grill potential recruits on advanced concepts such as APIs. However we truly believe that a person with sound knowledge of programming concept can readily grasp these.

5. Team spirit – Programming and development projects are often entrusted to multiple people. Try to gauge how good a team player is the candidate. Yours is a team-oriented operation. Lack of humility or empathy to team spirit can be a serious baggage later on. Make sure you are adequately covered on this soft skill aspect when interviewing potential hires. You will be sure to pick the right candidate this way. This factor becomes all the more necessary for a growing or midsize organization.

While measurable expectations will set the tone for initial rounds of interviewing, we believe that this is not the sole criteria when hiring Ruby on Rails developers. One has to look beyond qualification and experience and study their general aptitude to professional life.

If you see a surge in Ruby on Rails project demand, and want to capitalize with insight based talent sourcing in this domain, then we hope this post is of assistance to you.

Check out our new minimalistic brochure that we put together for the Garden City RubyConf 2014, Bangalore.