If your startup is looking to deliver a quality product as quickly as possible in a reliable, cost-effective, and scalable way… Ruby on Rails is the perfect development platform for that mission. Why? Discover and fall in love — just like we and innumerous companies like yours already have.
Selecting the right technology is one of the most important and impactful decisions in the competitive, demanding, fast-paced, and digital world we live in. It must be based on rigorous criteria and not on intuition. So, what’s there to consider for your business? Mainly four critical items when we are talking about future-proof digital products' creation, especially for startups: cost, time to market, industry standards, and security.
In all of them, Ruby on Rails stands out. Let’s dive deep into it so you better understand its huge success among startups.
Commonly referred to as RoR, this open-source web development framework is based on the Ruby programming language, and licensed under the MIT License. Ruby on Rails is a free general-purpose web development framework to create all kinds of applications, from simple websites to sophisticated platforms — and has a great track record. RoR was launched in 2004 and since has introduced multiple versions and improvements.
There are many reasons for becoming the startups’ tech of choice. Besides the beautiful word “free”, it is extremely time-efficient, which means creating a prototype in record time (MVP — Minimum Viable Product) and adjusting fast before moving on with minimal damage.
In fact, Ruby on Rails reduces development time by 25–50% when compared to other popular web frameworks. Creating and evolving a digital product is faster due to its lean code base, easy integration, modular design, extensive community support, reusable software made available by the community, and a wide range of plugins for feature development.
Yes, simplicity is in the DNA of Ruby on Rails. It assumes a “best” way to do things mentality — “The Rails Way” — resulting in a tremendous boost in productivity and overall happiness. Its philosophy includes two principles:
- Don’t Repeat Yourself — DRY is a principle of software development that states that “Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system”. By not writing the same information over and over again, the code is more maintainable, more extensible, and less buggy.
- Convention Over Configuration — Rails has opinions about the best way to do many things in a web application, and defaults to this set of conventions rather than require that you specify minutiae through endless configuration files.
Ruby on Rails is also highly consistent, with standardized file storage and rules that facilitate the structure and readability of the project. It creates a bug-free environment and is scalable — an essential quality to startups willing to rapidly expand their business. To top it off, security is embedded in the framework by default, making it an unbeatable bet.
From MVP to new product updates, the ease and speed of creating apps powered by Ruby on Rails drastically decrease startups’ time to market. That’s why heavyweights such as Netflix, Airbnb, Shopify, Groupon, and Basecamp, among many more, use Ruby on Rails.
Now it’s your turn :-)
The best part? You don’t even need to find and maintain an army of developers. Runtime Revolution is an expert on Ruby on Rails, breathes the startup world (don’t miss our case studies), and has everything you need to go from startup to scale-up.
Let’s talk about your specific challenges and count on our dedicated product development team!