Is Rails Dead?
By: Daniel Schaefer
Tags: Rails, Programming, Ruby, Ruby On Rails Development

Throughout civilization, there have been numerous earth-shattering debates. There have been philosophical debates, such as what came first, the chicken or the egg? There have been debates over technology such as which company has a better gaming console, Microsoft, or Sony? The answer is Sony, Microsoft can’t compete with their first-party exclusives (unless Elder Scrolls 6 becomes an Xbox exclusive). And the final debate being is Rails worth learning anymore?

I’m here to clear up the answer to this final debate, and the answer is a definitive “it depends…”. I know eh?

What is Rails?

To get a bit of housekeeping out of the way for readers that are in the dark, Rails or Ruby on Rails is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby that came out in 2004. It uses a model-view-controller (MVC) framework providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages (thank you Wikipedia!). In layman terms, it’s a backend framework that sets up all the boilerplate code for you so that you can begin working on the meat and potatoes of your app as quickly as possible.

Who uses Rails?

Well looking at the image below, you can see that quite a few companies have used Rails for their website.

List of companies using Rails Source: Adam Davison

It is among one of the more popular frameworks due to quite a few reasons that I’ll get into a bit. The above picture doesn’t even cover some of the bigger companies that use it, including Github, Airbnb, and Bloomberg.

Why use Rails?

I always enjoy a visual response as opposed to just a written one, so here’s my answer:

List of benefits of using Rails Source: Adam Davidson

Some of these speak for themselves but I’ll go over a few.

Development Speed

Its acceleration of development is nothing to scoff at, it can reduce a project’s development time by about 30–40%. The reason for this is that it provides a very rigid framework for you. If you work within the constraints of the framework itself, you’ll be able to build your app or at least an MVP (minimum viable product) in half the time! This is good because the sooner you can get funding for your app, the better, am I right?

An incredible number of Dependencies

Rails have been around since 2004, and the Ruby language itself has been around since 1995. While this may not seem like too long, for a web development language, this is quite mature. As such, with a strong and helpful community, there is nearly a dependency for everything. “There’s a gem for everything” is very much a saying, which is uber (Uber does not use Rails) helpful for development.

What are some drawbacks of Rails?

Like everything in life, Rails does have its drawbacks.

Rigidness

The rigidness of Rails which could be considered its strength is also one of its glaring weaknesses. The saying that Rails will only let you create the app it ‘allows’ you to is prevalent for a reason.

In a world where creativity is what makes or breaks an app nowadays, this could turn developers off from using Rails. Ruby also suffers when it comes to dependencies requiring machine learning and A.I. Its main competitor Python and its framework Django excels in the aforementioned aspects which is why more developers are moving towards that language. Machine learning is considered to be the future of development, and this does lend some credibility to the idea that Ruby on Rails is a dying framework.

Speed and Scalability

This is usually the main argument against Rails. It is not winning the gold medal in speed at the Olympics. This leads to poor scalability which is what led Twitter to change its framework. However, some would argue that most apps will not have as heavy the traffic that apps like Twitter have, so it’s a moot point. Of course, aiming high is one of the best ways to succeed.

Is Rails dead then?

Most popular scripting programming, scripting and markup languages Source: Stack Overflow July 2020

According to the above chart, while Ruby is not as popular as its main competitors, PHP and Python, it is still among the more popular programming languages in the world.

Interest in Ruby on Rails over time Source: Google Trends

As you can see from the chart above, there remains interest in RoR(Ruby on Rails) which doesn’t mean it is dead yet. Rails is still a very viable option for most businesses.

So, is Rails worth learning?

As I mentioned earlier, it depends. If you’re looking to build an eCommerce platform, and need it done quickly for cheap, then Rails is the way to go. It is simple, quick, and has a large enough community that developers should be able to solve any problem they run into.

If an app is looking to do something revolutionary and is using a lot of machine learning, then Rails is not the way to go.

For budding developers, is it worth it? I would say yes completely! RoR is a very good introduction to MVC, and with the number of dependencies available, it is a perfect arena to build practice projects to fill your portfolio… However, I would not recommend it as your introduction to programming. Node.JS jobs are a dime a dozen, and it is a far better language to understand core programming concepts. Once you got JavaScript down, give Rails a shot, and who knows, maybe mix React and Rails together to get the best of both worlds.

Sources:

https://www.solutelabs.com/blog/why-ruby-on-rails-is-still-a-good-choice

https://www.monterail.com/blog/why-ruby-on-rails-development-2020

https://codersera.com/blog/ruby-on-rails-in-2020/

https://gauravtiwari.org/why-ruby-on-rails-is-good-choice/