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Eric The Coder
Eric The Coder

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Django Rails or Laravel? My personal journey part 3

Hi, this is the third part of my review.

Today I will share my experience with Ruby on Rails. At first, Rails was not under my radar, in fact I have to admit that I didn't even know this framework existed. By hearing about it with passion in blogs and on different discussion groups, I decided to expand my research and get to know Rails.

I quickly fell in love with the Ruby language and the Rails framework. They say Ruby and Rails were designed for developer enjoyment and I totally agree with that. I quickly understood why several developers talk about it with passion.

Between Django, Rails, and Laravel, I found Rails to be the easiest to learn. Some blog reviewers say there are a lot of conventions to learn and that can make it a bit trickier at first. I don't agree. There is nothing more to learn in Rails than in Django or Laravel. In fact to start I would say that there is even less to learn and understand than other frameworks.

The designers of Ruby on Rails thought of the developer first and included a lot of shortcuts that skip a lot of configuration code.

The philosophy behind Ruby on Rails is to become Monolith King. That is to say, allow the developer to build a full stack application entirely in Rails from A to Z.

Ruby is also a very nice programming language and very easy to learn the basics. It reads like written English.

I have nothing bad to say both in terms of speed of development, fun and performance. Anything that can be done in Django and Laravel can be done in Rails, generally done faster and more easily.

That said, one issue with Rails and Ruby vs. Django and Laravel is popularity. Python has a huge community, and PHP runs on a massive amount of web servers.

Rails and Ruby don't have that kind of popularity and it shows.

For example, many (gem) packages are outdated or lack proper documentation. Additionally, some rare packages available in php or python are not available in Ruby on Rails.

Official Rails documentation is complete but not as easy to search and read as Laravel and Django documentations.

Last but not least, in my local community, Rails and Ruby are almost non-existent. Could be a problem if I need local resources later.

As you can see, after my testing I literally split in half. On the one hand, I really like the efficiency and the pleasure of working with Ruby on Rails, but on the other hand, the lack of popularity has consequences that can be detrimental in the medium and long term.

Since I'm in the start-up phase and everything remains to be learned and done, why would I choose a framework that is several times less popular? This is a question that I will have to answer before making my choice.

I wonder, for you would the popularity of a programming language influence you in your choice of framework?

That's all for today, don't miss my fourth part on Laravel.

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