With the changing year, many things have changed in the web programming languages. The number of JavaScript frameworks continues to grow, new languages have been developed faster than ever. Many web development companies are thinking to take up new projects in Ruby on Rails. As a Ruby on Rails development company, we did a detailed research on the use of Ruby gems and discovered that Ruby on Rails is a powerful language and it’s going to stay for a long.

We studied few projects using Postgre as the database and using Ruby gems. The experience was not so cool as their Redis instances were shut down. However, by making use of BestGems API which allowed to see daily updations into the total number of downloads for any gem developed our interest to believe in the bright future of Ruby on Rails Development.

Last year only 16.000 gems were created which are very less as compared to 26.000 in 2014. Nowadays, web development is changing rapidly, and requests for web applications are becoming more complicated. This makes our code more complicated, and therefore developers find other ways of producing code, which results in the creation of other frameworks and languages. RoR is one of this kind of language.

New Gems

The language’s stability plays a big role in its future existence. Creation of gems does not ensure that the language has become more powerful. However, the new version of RoR increased the use by 46% in web applications.

Databases Support

Ruby on Rails 5.0 download was the highest downloaded software as compared with other software. Also, use of Postgre left MySQL behind. Mongo’s usage remains consistent, with a slight increase. In the NoSQL category, Postgre remains on top.

Web servers

Thin, Puma and Unicorn are obviously being downloaded more and more with each passing month. Thin is surprisingly still in 1st place, but Puma will probably surpass it, since Heroku listed it as the recommended web server, and it replaced Rails’ default web server WEBrick with the release of Rails 5.

Testing of RoR

Minitest is still a runtime dependency for many gems such as ActiveSupport or Sinatra which makes the download count increase monthly, but RSpec had more downloads. There was a sudden hike in downloads in August. Finally, we discovered that a rare gem should have low dependency at runtime which will make it popular at that time.

Popular Framework

Rails is preferred over other languages for many reasons, one being that developers have various choices when tailoring the administration interfaces for their web applications. If you have simple model relations and a ‘straight-forward’ blog-like website, it is advisable to use one of the gems that provide you one.

Content Management System

The two most used UI frameworks, ActiveAdmin and RailsAdmin, are reaching their highest usages ever. Discussing Content Management Systems can be quite misleading since they usually depend on the architecture and business logic of a project. RefineryCMS is a well-known CMS that is designed for end users to create website content. It is simple to use, flexible when designing and extendable.

AlchemyCMS is more developer-oriented because it is more flexible in certain situations. Only the content itself is manipulated by the end user, not the HTML attributes of the page. Everything else is persisted to the database.

The latest status of Ruby on Rails shows:

• Rails was downloaded more than 24 million times
• 44 gems were released per day
• 332 gem versions were released per day

Conclusion

We are living in an era where it becomes mandatory for one web language to support other. The same is the case with Ruby on Rails development. After the comparison of different parameters, we can say that all programming languages are good for something, but none are perfect for everything, and RoR still has its place.

Despite the rise of Ruby on Rails alternatives, Ruby on Rails development companies still appreciate the benefits of a large and stable ecosystem with a mature community and easily choose a turn-key solution like Rails for rapid web development.