Today, we're excited to announce the addition of the Ruby programming language.
Ruby was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto and is designed for programmer productivity and fun, following the principles of good user interface design. At a Google tech talk, Matsumoto stated:
I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.
Ruby allows you to quickly build something from scratch with fewer lines of code. It was made incredibly popular thanks to the "Ruby on Rails" framework - a full-stack web framework that makes prototyping a breeze. It has become a framework of choice for many startups and coding beginners alike due to it's ease of use and flexibility.
Ruby's popularity surged with the advent of Web 2.0 and although its popularity has declined in recent years, it is still used extensively by some of the largest tech firms, including AirBnB, GitHub, Basecamp and Shopify.
What's great about Ruby on Rails?
- Simple to read and code. Like Python, Ruby is semantically easy to read - code in Ruby can be read much like reading English. This makes it a great choice for beginner programmers, and a very satisfying experience to code in.
- Fast development. If you want to develop a project in record time, nothing can beat Rails for speed. It's definitely a go to language for startups who want to release a minimum viable product and launch quickly - developers can typically buid a Rails app approximately 40% faster than other stacks.
- Massive library of ready-to-go code. Ruby's Gem library means that you can focus on the logic of your app as opposed to minor features or integrations. Ruby's library massively reduces time to market, with a huge number of pre-written functions and integrations with 3rd party services ready to use.
Ruby is great for web apps, e-commerce websites, content management systems or when you need to prototype something quickly or get out a fast MVP.
Many believe that Rails falls somewhat short in terms of ease of scalability and performance at scale, it is not a speed demon, and it may eat through more server resources than other alternatives.
That's why many startups will make their first MVP with Ruby, due to the speed of development, but may ultimately migrate to different frameworks once the project proves viable.
However, not everyone agrees. One of the worlds largest shopping platforms, Shopify, uses Ruby on Rails and they love using it due to how quickly they can develop features using it. The platform is also massively scaled, processing millions of requests per minute, proving that Ruby is also highly viable at scale. The key, according to Shopify, is in writing fast code.
Should you use Ruby?
If you want to develop quickly in a language that's easy to learn and understand, Ruby is a great choice. It may not be the ideal choice if your application will need to scale up to serve lots of users, but as Shopify have shown, that's certainly up for debate.From our perspective, we want to give our customers as much choice about what programming languages they can use on our platform, and so adding Ruby to the mix is a no brainer.
How do I get started with Ruby?
To get started, check our our knowledgebase for details on how to Enable Ruby in cPanel and How to Deploy a Ruby on Rails app in cPanel - in this example we run through installing Redmine, a popular project management web app written in Ruby on Rails.As ever, our team will be available to provide every assistance should you get stuck!
