Is your product in trouble if you built it with Ruby on Rails?

If you keep up to date with the Ruby on Rails community, you will have heard the murmurs in the last couple of years about Rails being dead, and if it is and your product uses it, then you are probably worried, understandably.?

So, let’s answer the question - Is Rails dead? And if it is, should you care??

The second question is the easiest to answer, so we’ll start there.?

These days, staying ahead of the curve is not just advantageous – it's essential to long-term success. As businesses like yours strive to keep pace with innovations and stay ahead of your competitors, your choice of web framework will be front of mind. You want an innovative web framework that makes innovation more straightforward, not more difficult. So yes, you should care if Rails is dead.?

Now, to answer the first question, is Rails dead? Short answer: no.?

Long answer: Rails made its debut in 2005. While that might seem recent, the tech world evolves rapidly, and tools can become obsolete as quickly as they become popular. Rails’ age often sparks discussion about its relevance, but we don’t listen to rumours at Pixie Labs; we prefer to look at the facts and figures.?

Why do we say that, you ask? Well, let’s delve into the wide range of use cases that Rails caters to and why it is an excellent choice for businesses across various domains.

Let’s get into it:?

How Modern Businesses Use Rails.

Let’s explore how contemporary businesses in different sectors leverage Rails:

E-commerce Sites, Booking Sites, and Marketplaces.

Rails provides engineering teams with the tools they need to respond quickly and flexibly to business requirements. This is especially valuable in online marketplaces, where developers can adapt and customise the platform for selling goods, services, or rentals.?

Likewise, in other industries like travel, hospitality, and event management, Rails facilitates the rapid development of booking and reservation systems with real-time features, allowing them to efficiently handle high user volumes.

More so, this flexibility allows developers to customise user interfaces, payment gateways, and other features to match the branding and functionality that a particular marketplace desires.?

Overall, it helps ensure a unique and tailored experience for vendors and customers.

Platforms that Support Complex Databases (Including SaaS)

Rails is essential in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) initiatives, as it helps create and deliver cloud-based apps. It provides tools and paradigms to build multi-tenancy applications. Its ability to scale is crucial for SaaS companies catering to various clients, allowing them to create, maintain, and expand software offerings efficiently, according to each client's needs.?

Rails is also valuable in data-intensive applications, like data analytics and business intelligence tools. It comes with ActiveRecord object-relational mapper (ORM), which simplifies database operations, making it easy to manage and query vast datasets, which is essential for data-driven businesses.

Social Media Platforms and Streaming Services

In social media settings, Rails aids in the construction and upkeep of user-friendly interfaces and real-time functions, facilitating efficient delivery of news feeds, notifications, chat features, and user profiles.

Rails supports WebSockets - a way of communicating in real-time with a customer’s web browser - through Action Cable, which is especially advantageous for enabling real-time interactions.?

Meanwhile, in streaming services encompassing video, audio, and live broadcasts, Rails capabilities are harnessed to manage user subscriptions, content distribution, and engagement features:

1. User Authentication and Subscription Management: Rails has good built-in and community support for user authentication, and you can use this to create user accounts and manage access to content based on subscription levels.
2. Media Library Management: features such as batch uploads, metadata editing, content tagging, and content scheduling can all be implemented easily using Rails.?
3. Content Management and Distribution: Rails comes built-in with ActiveStorage, a framework for handling media files. Levering this ensures content is accessible and properly distributed to viewers.
4. Engagement Features: Rails’ “support” for both AJAX and real-time updates can be used to provide viewers with an engaging and responsive user experience.
5. User Profiles and Recommendations: Implement algorithms and machine learning models for content recommendations, which can be seamlessly integrated into your Rails application.

Overall, Rails ensures seamless access to content for viewers while equipping administrators with practical tools for media library management.

Why Modern Businesses Choose Rails

If you’re still not convinced Rails is right for you, here are the key reasons why modern businesses are using Rails across various domains:

Flexibility & Quick Development Time

Whether you're building a small business website or a complex enterprise-level application, Rails provides the tools and conventions to get the job done efficiently.

This speed is particularly advantageous for startups and businesses looking to bring their products to market swiftly.

Scalability & Security

Rails applications can scale effectively, as discussed in our previous article. This scalability is vital for projects that may start small but need to expand as they gain users or customers.?

Moreover, its robust security features help protect user information and maintain data integrity, crucial for maintaining trust and legal compliance.

RESTful APIs

If you’re looking to build a product or platform with multiple frontends (e.g. you want your product to have a web version, an iPhone app, and an Android app), you probably want to build an API. This interface allows your product's different versions to perform their relevant behaviours. Rails has first-class support for building API-only platforms, including functionality that lets you easily construct JSON-based responses and add custom middleware to augment your API with functionality like rate limiting and token-based authentication.

Multi-Tenancy Support

For software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, Rails offers excellent support for building multi-tenant applications. With the availability of libraries explicitly designed for multi-tenancy, it's easier to create software that serves multiple clients securely and efficiently.

SEO Friendliness

Rails provides various gems and configurations to enhance SEO for websites. This is particularly beneficial for e-commerce businesses that rely on search engine rankings to attract organic traffic.?

Of course, it goes without saying that improving SEO can lead to higher visibility and increased revenue.

MVC Architecture

Rails follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, which is well-suited for complex business logic and applications requiring a user interface.?

This separation of concerns helps maintain codebase organisation and simplifies the development and maintenance process as the project grows.

Real-Time Features

Rails support for WebSockets through Action Cable, starting from Rails 5, is essential for building real-time features like chats, notifications, and live updates.?

Social media platforms, in particular, benefit from these capabilities as they enhance user engagement and interactivity.

Rails in Action: 3 Real-Life Use Cases

It’s all good to tell you how great and valuable Rails is for modern businesses, but what does this look like in action? Let’s explore some famous use cases:?

Twitter

Of course, Twitter employed Rails for specific aspects of its platform. (If you remember reading our previous article on its security elements)

Twitter initially used Rails because of its flexibility and quick development capabilities.

However, as the platform grew, they had to make significant architectural changes and introduce other technologies to handle the immense scale and traffic that Twitter was experiencing.?

Despite still using Rails for some parts of the platform, it is no longer the primary technology powering the entire service. But Rails was integral to Twitter's early success, and its tools and design enabled Twitter to rapidly iterate from a group SMS app to the influential social network it is today.?

Shopify

Shopify, a leading e-commerce platform that powers thousands of online stores worldwide, was initially built with and continues to use Rails.?

Since its launch, Shopify has made significant investments in performance optimisation, custom infrastructure, and the introduction of other technologies to ensure that it can handle the demands of its large and diverse user base. But fundamentally, Shopify is still powered by one of the world's largest Rails codebases.

This allows Shopify to provide a user-friendly interface for merchants to set up and run their online stores while efficiently managing complex e-commerce data and operations.

GitHub

GitHub, the world's largest platform for hosting and collaborating on software code, uses Rails. It handles difficult version control and code repository data for millions of developers.

Ruby on Rails: The Best Choice for Modern Businesses

To summarise - Is Rails dead? No.?

Rails has established itself as a versatile and reliable choice for various use cases.?

Its flexibility, quick development time, scalability, and security features make it an attractive option for businesses across industries.?

As you consider your technology stack, keep in mind the success stories of companies that have harnessed Rails to thrive in their respective domains.?

If you're looking to embrace the power of Rails, Pixie Labs is the most up-to-date and expert service provider, ready to assist you on your journey toward success in the digital age.