The week starting Monday 17th September was #nationalcodingweek for 2018 – a week-long celebration and promotion of the skills and careers available in coding.
As part of the celebration, we asked our team of senior developers to tell us what they love about developing projects for our clients and working in our development framework of choice, Ruby on Rails.
Here’s what they had to say about Ruby and its benefits for a digital project:
1. RUBY ON RAILS IS THE BEST FRAMEWORK FOR WEB APPS
As a framework, Ruby on Rails is exceptionally well-suited to web application development.
Our Technical Director, Matt, summarises: “Ruby on Rails was created specifically for building web applications. This is apparent in the framework’s numerous code libraries (known as ‘Gems’ in the Ruby community) which provide free, open source code that developers can use to fulfil specific needs for a website or app – ideal for keeping costs down and speeding up project development.”
Mauricio, one of our senior developers agrees, he says, “For example, Devise is a very popular code library in Ruby. It provides user authentication functionality for websites and apps, including signing up, signing in, and password recovery. Having these sort of building blocks ready-to-go allows developers to focus on the core problem they’re trying to solve for a client’s project, rather than having to write code for basic functionality.”
2. RUBY HAS A GREAT COMMUNITY
One of the primary reasons why our developers enjoy working with Ruby on Rails is its great community – and the wealth of resources that this creates.
Senior Developer, Muntasim, elaborates on how the Ruby on Rails community enables faster, more cost-effective development for our clients’ projects: “The extensive Ruby on Rails community has one major benefit – developers contribute rich libraries of code which other developers can use to build new functionality in their projects, rapidly. There’s a great sense of support and collaboration amongst Ruby on Rails developers.”
Though many other coding frameworks are now starting to catch up, Ruby on Rails still has the most firmly established community of developers who specialise in creating complex web applications.
3. RUBY IS ROBUST & HIGH-QUALITY
Another benefit of the extensive Ruby on Rails community is that all developers are encouraged to follow a set of community-supported coding conventions and standards. This helps them to write and maintain better code – the cornerstone of high-quality, robust digital products and services.
Crucially, these robust community coding standards ensure that open source Ruby on Rails code libraries are of good quality and are well-supported, with updates and fixes regularly contributed by other developers.
As our senior developer, Mauricio, explains, these high standards and community contributions are a significant reason why developers and businesses find Ruby on Rails to be such an attractive framework. When our developers use open source code libraries, our projects benefit from rapid development and robust, well-maintained code
4. RUBY IS AN INTUITIVE LANGUAGE
From their experience of a variety of coding languages, our developers find Ruby most intuitive when it comes to writing.
Vasili, one of our Senior Developers, praises Ruby for its clarity – “Ruby uses fewer characters than a lot of other coding languages. I like that I can write code in intuitive, natural language, rather than having to use a lot of special characters.”
As another Senior Developer, Santosh, describes it – code that’s written in Ruby is “clean”.
For a developer, this clear, concise style of syntax makes writing code in Ruby simple and efficient compared to other programming languages – ultimately leading to faster development and more robust outcomes for clients’ projects.
5. RUBY IS EASY-TO-READ
In addition to writing code, developers spend a significant amount of their working day reading code. They read their own code, colleagues’ code, and third-party code.
Our Senior Developer, Aleksey, is clear on one thing – Ruby is a very readable coding language.
He says, “When you can read the code like a story, it’s very helpful – you can be on the same page as the author in just a moment. You don’t have to write Ruby code in the ‘typical’ style of a programming language; there are a lot of possibilities to write beautiful, readable code in Ruby.”
Here’s an example of Ruby code compared to PHP – another coding language – notice how Ruby uses fewer characters, less special symbols, and more explicit syntax:
English - Is John happy? PHP - $john->isHappy() Ruby - john.happy?
For our developers, easy-to-read code means that they can rapidly get up-to-speed on a new project, ready to support or extend it, and quickly peer-review other developers’ code to maintain high development standards. Ultimately, this speeds up the overall development process.
6. RUBY ENABLES RAPID DEVELOPMENT
In the final contribution to our #nationalcodingweek series, our Senior Developer, Wibert, succinctly explains why Ruby on Rails is so appealing to developers and beneficial to clients – “Ruby on Rails is like magic, you can achieve a lot in a short time”.
Ultimately, this is why we use Ruby on Rails – readily-available code libraries which are designed for websites and apps, an active community which promotes high-quality development, and code that’s simple to write and read.
By developing in Ruby on Rails, we can achieve rapid development with high-quality results for our clients. Please take a look at our client stories to find out what Ruby on Rails development can deliver in practice.
