ASP.net Vs Ruby on Rails
By: Amit Ashwini
Tags: Startup Lessons, Ruby on Rails, Web Development, Entrepreneurship, Software Development

What technology should I work with, is a question we all sometimes struggle with while planning software development. Often, projects are bracketed into different segments like small, medium or enterprise size, depending on various factors like budget, timeframe, and complexity of the project. Another factor to consider if you’re not outsourcing is to look at which technology is most closely related to the skills of your in-house team preparing to build the new product. Else, you might have to take into account the time and budget necessary to train your team to learn a new set of tools. The first step of choosing what technology to use will start with understanding the project requirements completely and then deciding what segment it fits into. Selecting a web framework is a challenging task due to a huge number of aspects to take into consideration. End of the day, you have to decide what framework works best for you, but keep aside your inherent prejudices and make sure your decision is ultimately data-driven.

Now coming to ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails, you will not find anything which can be done with one, but not the other. In other words, the technological capabilities are about equivalent, but the significant difference is the availability of open source extensions and community support. The rails community is much larger and more engaged than the ASP.NET community and is known to provide much better support. The ASP.NET community has some public and open source extensions, but a fraction of what’s available for Rails.

Ruby on rails

Rails is best suited for medium sized projects. Ruby on Rails is a Model View Controller framework, providing default structures for a web service, a database, and web pages. It facilitates and encourages the use of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript for user interfacing and display, paired with web standards such as XML or JSON for data transfer. In addition to MVC, Rails emphasizes the use of other well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration (CoC), don’t repeat yourself (DRY), and the active record pattern.

Advantages:

Can be embedded into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

Super advanced string and text manipulation techniques.

A Very High-Level Language (VHLL).

It allows encapsulation of data methods within objects.

Maintaining scalable and big programs written in Ruby is easy.

Pure OOP (Object-Oriented Programming).

Can be easily connected to MySQL, DB2, Oracle, and Sybase.

Ability to write multithreaded applications with a simple API.

It offers advanced array class.

Better security features.

It gives you the ability to write external libraries in Ruby or C.

It has a debugger.

It has flexible syntax.

Powerful string handling.

Limitations:

The learning curve can be steep.

Slower processing time (CPU time)

Development and updates are slower than ASP.Net.

It doesn’t have enough informational resources.

If you want a simple data driven application which isn’t going to have a significant load, then go with Ruby on Rails, but if you go beyond this use case, you will quickly discover the limitations of the framework. Of course, there are workarounds to these problems, but most are a tad experimental.