Difference between Ruby and Ruby on Rails

At some point of time, when choosing the technology tools for your business application, you are faced with this question – “what is the difference between ‘Ruby’ and ‘Ruby on Rails’”. Let us try to get this sorted for you so you could make an informed decision on your choice of web application technology.

What is Ruby?

Ruby is a programming language – the one your developer uses to write the program for your application – just the way they use PHP or C++ – Ruby is also one of those. A programming language is nothing but a set of keywords and symbols that are used by a developer to write programs. Out of all the popular and general purpose programming languages, Ruby is a good one because of its ease of understanding and learning and the impactful features it is rich with. Using this versatile and friendly programming language, your developer can write almost all types of programs which may range from a Desktop Applications, with MacRuby for example, to the command line scripts that allow you to automate the actions on a computer system. As a high-level programming language, Ruby is capable of running on various OS platforms including UNIX versions, Windows & Mac OS. It is purely object-oriented and equipped with an active and helpful community offering services to many issues.

What is a Web Application?

To know the difference between Ruby and Ruby and Rails, you need to also understand what a web application is. A web application is a specific type of a program that can run on a remote computer system or a web server. An application accepts the requests on http from the users on web browsers, responding to them with html or other data format. This is the type of a program that can also be written using Ruby. However, writing a fully functional web application using Ruby, can turn out to be daunting as it may need handling multiple requests, storing the data in some persistent storage, keeping the calculated information as html and more.

What is Ruby on Rails?

Rail is a framework to implement the web applications that the developer writes using Ruby. It is also capable of working on different platforms including Linux and Windows. With Rails, it is easier for your developer to write Model-view-controller (MVC) web applications. It also makes it easier for your developer to write more powerful, expressive, and readable code; write and execute automated tests; and much more. When it comes to the development time and efficiency, Ruby on Rails is way ahead of many other frameworks and languages because of several features and benefits such as the object-oriented nature of Ruby, the programming language forming its base, and the huge collection of open source code that the Rails Community has to offer.

Why Ruby on Rails

Rails web apps give good results for rapid application development despite taking a lot lesser time to write. Since the framework can be customised to the technical requirements. Also a proven testing framework, Rails is strongly focused on offering great quality to the developers with minimum efforts. The best part about Rails is that the code is reusable for different projects to directly achieve time and cost savings for your business. With free availability of hundreds of thousands of plug-ins and Gems, your application can easily achieve any additional functionality or elaborate customisation you would fancy. We hope this explains the difference between Ruby and Ruby on Rails for you to take a decision on technology tools for your business application.

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