What is Ruby on Rails?

"Convention over configuration" and "don’t repeat yourself" — once we’ve heard those, we knew that from that moment on, it would be our way of coding. We love Ruby on Rails. It’s optimized for programmer happiness and that means better software for everyone.

Ruby on Rails is trying to solve many common problems in software development. Instead of creating the same service that is handling fetching data from the database over and over, ActiveRecord is a plug and play solution that is able to do it in minutes, using only a few lines of code. You want to send an email with a notification, have an admin panel to overview the data and be able to update the necessary information? Same thing, this problem was already solved and is part of the Ruby on Rails framework — so developers can implement it using small amounts of code and focus on what they really like — solving new problems.

Writing in popular languages can be frustrating at times and it’s understandable — unnecessary methods and a lot of code to create a simple solution is something that developers are struggling with everyday. Instead of focusing on business problems, we’re often too busy trying to apply a basic idea into reality, working with build blocks that require much effort.

Every app is different, so custom software development requires us to build things that were never implemented before. This doesn’t mean that we have to start from scratch though — the Ruby on Rails developers community is very active and also very open. We share knowledge and code using plugins called gems, and there are tens of thousands of them. When building things like authentication, role management, connecting to APIs and async processing, although they’re custom for each application, we can still use some of the open source code support to speed up development.

Solid foundation of Ruby on Rails also allows custom software development without worrying about underlying problems with security, bugs and scaling. Core pieces of software were already reviewed by thousands of developers, so all that’s left for our strong technical team is defining the business logic layer and building a great product.

What can you build in Ruby on Rails?

Modern applications look very different from the ones from a few years ago, so infrastructure plays an increasingly big role in the planning and development of recent tools. Automated scaling provided by Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services is crucial when optimizing for applications that are expecting huge differences in traffic. The use of Ruby on Rails in web development is very beneficial, as its framework is created with backend in mind.

Many applications start from something simple. Aggregating data from users, then trying to process it efficiently and then preparing some output data, notifications and payments. Usually each segment looks very differently in different tools. Sometimes the aggregation of information is actually very complex, requires integrating with an external API for collecting voice information or bank data.

The next step can be even more challenging, with data analysis where custom AI machine learning models need to be prepared and trained. In other scenarios, it’s analysing information provided by tools like Google Cloud Bigtable or Amazon Web Services Redshift — they are great for providing useful data from huge databases.

After the data is all processed and ready, there’s another big step — pushing it all out to the users. Depending on the scale of the application, communication with end users can happen in multiple ways. We’re working with chatbots provided by Google Cloud Dialogflow - so Facebook and Google Hangouts, but also push notifications, SMS and of course mass email delivery services.