I have been using the Rails framework for quite a while now, so I would like to share some of my experince with you. Till now, I have built or participated in more than 8 in-production rails projects and I got to say - although it has it’s drawbacks - ruby on rails got what you need to support most projects or ideas.
Ruby is a developer candy
Easy to read, write, understand. The code syntax is pretty much like writing simple sentences.
Wanna build an MVP super fast? GO RAILS
It’s robust, it has everything you need (and likely a bit more). You will have readymade solutions for most situations,
a pretty great community to discuss problems with, easy maintainability and a short learning curve.
Rails is beginner friendly and a good entrypoint to web development as well.
Ruby and Rails both rely heavily on OOP.
Two other building pillars of rails are:
- The “DRY” principle - Don’t Repeat Yourself
- and “Convention over configuration” - stick to a predefined way of solving problems
It might just be a little too big for smaller tasks
Rails is not for microservices. In my opinion Rails was built for monolith systems. It knows a lot of things out of the box but not necessarily the right way and all the components that you might not even use make it a bit bloated.
Rails in business
Since tons of startups picked rails a couple of years ago to deliver their products, there are lots of open positions. The knowledge is very portable, so if you settle for a job, you will likely get other opportunities as well. Rails developers are usually well paid if there is enough experience in stash. As of 2019 rails is a mature technology with slightly less attention than before. Both the framework and language are continuously getting updated.
There are many popular apps built with rails like: GitHub, Kickstarter, Shopify and Airbnb