The importance of choosing the right technology stack

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