Ruby vs Ruby on Rails: facts and comparison

Let’s learn the actual difference between the two and whether they work together or have the same syntax? To answer all these queries, we have explained both the terms in deep. Our major focus is to make you understand the actual meaning of both and their importance with a short comparison.

What is ruby?

 

Yukihiro Matsumoto developed ruby language

In 1990 in japan. It is an object-oriented language, and it was designed with an objective to maintain a sensible buffer between human programmers and computing machinery. It is based on many other languages like Perl, Lisp, Smalltalk, Eiffel, and Ada. One of the benefits of ruby language is that it is an interpreted scripting language. It means its implementations execute on its own freely and directly. There is a benefit of ruby gems as well. The use of ruby is in wide-field, especially it is used in web applications and science.

As ruby has clear syntax, it makes it easier to understand and write. Programs written in ruby language are easily maintainable and scalable. To extend ruby, many libraries are written, and this mainly emphasizes testing.

Features of ruby –

• Dynamic typing

• Ducktyping

• Flexible syntax

• Inheritance

• Garbage collection

• Exception handling

• Overloading

• Lexical closures

• Built-in support

• Variable scope

• Iterators

• Custom dispatch behavior

• Centralized management system

• Extended library

What is Ruby on Rails?

It is an open-source framework written in ruby language. Heinemeier Hanson developed Ruby on Rails in the year 2003. Basecamp, a web-based project management application, used to be the base of rails. It works on various windows like macintosh, windows, and Linux. For all common databases, ROR is very compatible.

Convention over configuration concept comes into action, which leaves minimal configuration at the time of writing code.

As rails run on top of an HTTP server, and also ruby and rails are related, yet they are different.

Ruby is a programming language, and Rails is a web development framework. Ruby on Rails is written in ruby language. For ROR, ruby is an essential component.

Many companies use the ROR framework like twitter, Kongregate, Airbnb, Shopify, Heroku, instacart, twitch, etc.

While dear users, both ruby and RoR are free, and you can easily download the package.

Features of ruby on rails-

Increase the developer’s productivity with some main features of ruby on rails.

• MVC architecture- now separate data from presentation through MVC (model view controller) architecture.

• Database access library- active record simplifies data handling in databases. It maps tables to classes and rows to objects automatically.

• The host of libraries- ROR simplifies the coding of common programming tasks through the host of libraries.

• Customized URL- using the ROR framework, you can develop custom or search engine URLs.

• Convention over configuration- there is no XML configuration in the ROR. To specify the configuration parameters, it includes simple programming conventions.

• AJAX library: in the Rails framework, it facilitates an extensive library of AJAX functions.

• Debugging: detailed error logs help in easy debug applications.

• Components: modularize templates and store reusable code using components.

A short comparison between the two-

	Ruby	Ruby on Rails
Definition	Ruby is an open-source, object-oriented and interpreted programming language	An open-source web development framework based on Ruby programming language
Developed By	Yukihiro Matsumoto	Heinemeier Hansson
Pricing	Free	Free
Type	Open-source	Open-source
Benefits	A dynamic programming language Dynamically typed ruby variable Greater flexibility	Web apps can be written in less time Library of function gems can be used in different codebases Build on Ruby
Website	ruby-lang.org	rubyonrails.org
Influence	Perl and Smalltalk inspire it	Django and laravel inspire it
Syntax	The syntax is similar to Perl and python	Syntax similar to phoenix in elixir and python
Framework	Not a framework	Web development framework

Conclusion –

From the above facts, it is clear both ruby and ruby on rails are open source, free of cost, and readily available. Based on the client’s specification and requirements, language/framework is identified to develop the applications for end-users. Both ruby and ruby on rails are getting good ground and a good pace in markets. If you have any queries, please drop it in the comment section below.

Thank you for reading 🙂