Okay, This is bit of a crazy claim. Everyone tells you build your web app in a programming language you are most familiar with but I am going to share my experience and why I think ruby on rails is worth learning for your new project.
I am a software developer with around 4 years of software development experience. Around 2 years of nodejs/javascript and 2 years of java. So I have seen fair amount of 2 competently different kind of languages. Enough about me lets get to the point.
I had the idea of building Colearn 4–5 months back and were deciding on building basic prototype to validate the initial idea. Nodejs experience was not so good for me in my first startup job so nodejs was out of question. Java is too verbose and slow for prototyping so I tried play framework since it usages java and scala which is close to java and created a basic prototype in play. Then after doing little bit of experimentation and getting positive feedback on prototype my friend joined me and suggested we build from ground up in ruby on rails. I was little bit hesitant as I had no idea about ruby as a language and rails a framework. After doing bit of research on internet and bit of convincing from my friend we decided to go with ruby on rails. Since then I have been amazed with how fast development is with ruby on rails. Here are few points why I think ruby on rails is amazing and you should use it for your next web app/project.
- Rails follows a convention over configuration philosophy and has a strong focus on web application development.
- Rails provides fantastic tooling that helps you to deliver more features in less time. It provides a standard structure for web apps, where all the common patterns are taken care of for you.
- There’s a gem (3rd party module) for just about anything you can think of.
- It’s ORM(Object relational model) Active record is simply best so you don’t have to worry about writing queries and managing database.
- Db versioning, migration, hot reloading, email framework and any other thing you can think of is already solved in ruby on rails.
Don’t believe me try building small blog website in rails by following guide http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
Finally I am still learning new things about ruby on rails. I simply loved ruby on rails and changed my view about frameworks and really improved my understanding of designing API, frameworks etc and it is worth learning just for that.
We are trying to solve the problem of learning together by building Colearn and deeply believe learning should be a social activity. Let me know your experience and hit like/recommend if you liked the content.
Edit-1: We are no longer maintaining colearn :( but it has been made open source. So feel free to host it or use it for any purpose. contact me if you need any help.