Ruby on Rails Reviews & Product Details

The convention over configuration mentality is the best thing about Rails. I have worked at so many places where they used their own framework concoction or it grew up organically, and you spend the first weeks just learning the framework, and then the rest of your work-life trying to solve problems in that framework that have been solved by way smarter people than you. This is what Rails solves in a simple, easy to learn, great documentation and scalable way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The sluggishness of the framework. It's definitely plenty fast for most use cases it's just that I know I'm wasting a looot of cycles on the Rails framework. It's totally worth it and hardware is dirt cheap, it's just that my service is not so revenue intensive so any corner that can be cut is worth looking into. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some of the first things I liked coming from PHP frameworks were the Ruby language and the "convention over configuration" paradigm. Once you get that into your mindset and with the help of the Ruby on Rails guides and scaffolding tools you will have a solid base structure to focus on building the features that matters. Having tests as a first class citizen also allows you to learn really productive/agile stuffs such as BDD and red/green refactor cycle.

At first it might seem too much rigid about its conventions but after using Rails for a while you will be able to note that you can apply different conventions and design patterns to achieve different purposes, for example use Service Objects to avoid super fat models, render server side Javascript instead of HTML/ERB, connect to non SQL database or use PostgreSQL jsonb datatypes, background jobs.

What's even better is that Rails is incorporating new technologies with each new version. For example, web sockets will be included in Rails 5 via ActionCable and Rails 4 included ActiveJob which was something you have to do "manually" before to have support for async jobs.

And something really important when having code in production is the Rails security reports google group that is constantly reporting security issues with patches and/or instructions to mitigate vulnerabilities. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are not too many things I dislike about Rails but despite one of the things I like best are conventions, some of them I don't like too much like concerns.

Perhaps another thing I don't like too much is the level/length of the component stacks but maybe that's something that is improving over time. I mean, for a given point in code execution there is in my opinion a long stack before it. Most of the times those are part of tools/gems you're using but IMHO some things could be a little more flat. Anyways, I'm not a Rails contributor and I have to agree with the tradeoff between productivity and code execution efficiency. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We've been using rails across 5 projects that our company is working on and I think it's really true what they say about Rails - "Allows small teams to do big things". We've moved several projects from other Frameworks to Rails mainly because there's a good amount of functionality out of the box and we really don't need to waste time writing code for that. It's allowed us to focus on building the product rather than looking into things like routing and adding things to the database.

We've also found that the rails community is really helpful and active which has also helped us grow into better developers. Because we love the rails community quite a few of our developers have also started to give back to it which is really nice to see! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Rails has quite a steep learning curve and also a lot of care needs to be taken into integrating other frameworks such as AngularJS to a Rails app.

We've also seen that since there is so much magic that rails takes care of, there is a chance that developers sometimes don't understand what is really happening in the background. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

High productivity, readability and maintainability. Ruby is an excellent language to allow the developer to focus on high level software design concepts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Process based concurrency is very inefficient. Rails used a lot of RAM, is hard to make real time applications with it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's a great tool for creating MVPs. It's fast and beautiful. Rails code is clean and effective. I also can use free heroku server and it's great. Rails is opensource framework. Documentation is also almost perfect and you don't need to read something else to start coding. There is also some good rails content management systems, e-commerce engines etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dependencies management (but it's mb because i've used php before). What was also important for me is Windows compability, but i know that it's more likely my problem, not rails's :) (I used railsinstaller and sqllite on windows).

There are not so many junior dev job offers, so it's hard to find a job, if you are junior developer. Especially if you are not in USA (but it would be fair to say that the ratio of remote work to office work is the best). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The community surrounding Rails is vast. This provides a great array of tools that people have built to make developing for Rails much easier. It also means there are people using Rails in a wide range of applications. This feeds back into Rails development, making it a tool that works in many situations.

Rails also has a vibrant testing culture. This makes for more reliable products that are well built. It is so easy to do TDD using Rails. This has saved me many hours of hair pulling as every aspect of the products is tested. Overall TDD has improved our release cadence and reduced our code churn significantly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Long Term Support is lagging behind what one would expect from a paid product. This is obviously because it is an open source community maintaining the product. However there are paid solutions people can buy into for LTS. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ruby on Rails makes it fast to bootstrap your product and get an MVP running for a small startup. If you're in a larger company the Rails monolith allows you to enforce standards like default database structures, and routing patterns. Ruby Gems make it trivial to add additional functionality to your environment and amazing testing frameworks like Capybara and Cucumber make TDD and BDD a breeze. Although still relatively young at under 10 years old, it's been battle-tested by companies like Twitter and Github. There's something to be had for developers of any level. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Because Ruby on Rails enforces standards, it makes it difficult to sometimes tailor your platform for specific needs; there's the "Rails way" of developing and deploying which can be drastically different than what developers may be used to. Additionally, the monolithic nature of Rails made it difficult to use Rails as a back-end while employing a front-end like Ember.js. Active Model JSON Serialization has alleviated some of this stress and Rails API has been merged into the upcoming Rails 5.0 release making this less of a concern. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We use Rails as a web API for our mobile app. It has many tools right out of the box and has many conventions that makes many configurations unnecessary, which make it very quick and easy to deploy. The Rails has an awesome documentation and a community is enormous, and just about every beginner question has been answered, this makes it very beginner friendly despite the poorly documented underlying language Ruby. Because of the size of the Rails community, there are many third party gems that cater to your needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The "conventions over configurations" philosophy behind Rails can also be frustrating to some developers looking for a more customizable solution. For example, as a web API, Rails has a simple-to-use JSON parsing tool as long as the JSON structure mirrors your underlying models. However, if you want to create custom JSON, this can result in extremely verbose and ugly code. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For quick web development, ruby on rails is a wonderful framework that works like a charm. Ruby as a programming language is very easy to code and learn and rails is completely based on ruby. The MVC elements are bound very well in ruby on rails and it enables us to write clean, reusable code. Also there is a very good community for ruby on rails. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As your web application grows bigger, ruby on rails may just slow your app a little bit. This is in comparison to others and this is one major drawback of using ruby on rails. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

* Easy to setup.

* Lots of tools (gems) to choose from

* Very flexible, works with many frameworks

* Asset pipeline is really nice

* Great community - very large and active.

* Still under very active development.

* It's free.

* Good performance.

* Lots of good assumptions, promotes good application structure.

* TDD Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

* ActiveRecord - it's good for people who are new to this field. But it's really easy to fall into its traps.

* Scaling can be tricky, especially for newcomers.

* Doesn't enforce good practice. People can easily write bad code to get things done. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.