Strengths and Weaknesses - Ruby on Rails

Question

I was wondering what are the strengths and weakness of using Ruby on Rails for Web Application development. I would like an insight from other developers as to why they have chosen to write in Ruby on Rails over other languages and technologies.

What does Ruby on Rails provide that has the edge over other web application technologies and languages?

Are there any unique capabilities that the language provides?

Thanks in advance, hopefully I will be able to make the choice as to use the language or not.

Answer 1

Ruby on Rails is a server side technology, it cannot be compared to Flash or Silverlight that are client side technologies, like apples and bananas.

EDIT (for the edited question) Rails's main strength over other server side tech's is ease of use and development speed. This comes from 2 factors:

• ruby is a expressive and easy language
• rails provides a simple yet powerful API (call it "programmer interface") that lets you focus on "doing your stuff" rather than "how to do it"

You write less code and don't struggle with side problems. I'd add a great mature community and plethora of plugins and ready-made code.

Answer 2

I think, Ruby on Rails' strength is a community. There are a lot of people to ask about framework. Also there are many books, libs, plugins, etc.

No matter which technology or framework you will choose, just do not limit yourself with it.

Answer 3

Ease of learning and speedy development are big pluses

It runs pretty slow though (compared to, say, ASP.net)

Answer 4

Faster development, slower runtime

Answer 5

Disadvantage is that many of the folks building larger apps have continued to work with C#/Java/PHP; there's not a lot of huge apps running on Ruby.

From my understanding - it runs slightly slower than the big three up there - large apps are staying where they were.