In the ever-evolving landscape of web application development, choosing a scalable and reliable web application architecture and the stack is very important in building a dynamic web application. There are several choices from the barrage of Model View Controller (MVC) frameworks across different languages.
Ruby On Rails has emerged to be one of the top choices and one of the most popular open source web application framework and there are hundreds of thousands of application built with the framework since its release in 2004 and some of the big name names are Airbnb, GitHub, Shopify, Twitch, SoundCloud, Hulu, Basecamp, Zendesk, Square, SlideShare, Dribble, Kickstarter, SendGrid, Groupon.
Rails provide a lot of libraries(gems) that will help in building a scalable application, here are a few of the most used gems:
Devise – Authentication
Capistrano – Deployment
sass-rails – integration for sass stylesheet language.
Geocoder – complete geocoding solution
Sidekiq – background processing
Ruby On Rails Benefits:
- Unmatched durability, availability, and scalability
- Easy, flexible data transfer
- Flexible management
- Most comprehensive security and compliance capabilities
Use Cases:
- Data lakes and Big Data analytics
- Data Archiving
- Backup and Recovery
The core components of any modern web application stack include as follows;
Client-Side
The client side code which consists of (HTML/CSS/Javascript) that lives and renders on the browser and that providers interactions with the user and what enables modern client-side code to be responsive even though HTML and CSS are the building blocks of the web, these amazing javascript frameworks that are used on the client side JQuery, Angular and React.
Server-Side or Back-end
The server side programming or back-end code is where most of the business logic code resides. The HTTP request from the browser is passed to server side and server-side code responds to these HTTP requests as an HTTP Response. JSON has become a standard in returning. Most of the Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) operations are performed on different data models on the server side. A lot of core application security features such as authentication, access is handled in server-side along with several core components of a web application. The business logic is generally written in the controller layer and is responsible for handling the incoming HTTPS requests and sending a response. Rails Controllers can generate XML, JSON, PDFs, Mobile Views as responses and more.
Rest API
Restful API is a lightweight process of communication between web-based client and server and replaced RPC and SOAP which were used in the past. Ruby On Rails provides easy tooling for defining endpoints in the form of routes.
It can be understood that rails help developers to build websites and applications as it improves the efficiency by simplifying repetitive tasks. The major factors of web applications including client-side, server-side and APIs can be implemented relatively quickly as Rails does most of the work for us!
