Ruby on Rails is the perfect tool to transform your business vision into working software. It’s a programming environment that allows you to quickly create web applications using Ruby, the most dynamic language of the modern era. It’s very popular among startups and it’s used by major companies like Airbnb, Github, Shopify and more.
Rails has been around the block since 2004 and it has been growing stronger and evolving with each release circle. In a hipster kind of way, it’s not even that cool anymore. This is a good thing when it comes to choosing a technology stack: you want something proven. And Rails is just that.
Ruby on Rails is also a great choice for an API-only application due to its strong testing framework. It’s also easy to pick up quickly and makes it easy for junior developers to get started with test driven development, which can lead to valuable applications being built much faster than normal. If you’re working in Ruby, or want to learn it and not sure where to start, Ruby on Rails is a good place to start.
Below are some of the gems to speed up your development process with ruby on rails:
1) Devise
Almost every project needs some sort of authentication, Devise gem is an open source authentication solution for Rails. Devise gem gives you a user-friendly way to implement authentication in your Ruby on Rails projects. It handles setting up a session and validating incoming username and password logins for you. You can also use it to authenticate users through Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
2) Solargraph
One of the advantages of IDE’s is IntelliSense and Solargraph provides a comprehensive suite of tools for Ruby programming: IntelliSense, diagnostics, inline documentation, and type checking. Inline documentation helps you view all the allowed methods of the class/object, and also helps you easily understand the definition of each method and its arguments. Solargraph Context-aware autocompletion will also help speed up your development process.
3) Pry
When it comes to debugging, Pry is my go-to gem. Pry is a runtime developer console and IRB alternative with powerful introspection capabilities. Pry opens a session at the point it’s called and makes all program state at that point available. When the session ends the program continues with any modifications you made to it. This allows you to look inside your code and find out what’s going on and what needs fixing.
4) Administrate
Most of the time you are going to need an admin dashboard for your project, there are couple of rails admin panels but Administrate gem stands out. Administrate is a library for Rails apps that automatically generates admin dashboards. Administrate’s admin dashboards give non-technical users clean interfaces that allow them to create, edit, search, and delete records for any model in the application.
Administrate provides a better user experience for site admins, and be easier for developers to customize as it comes with no DSL, and supports simple use cases. It also very easy to override and provides a wide range of extensions.
5) RSpec
Testing is important as minimizes bugs and the need to refactor as your codebase increases in size and complexity. RSpec is a testing tool for Ruby, created for behavior-driven development (BDD). It is the most frequently used testing library for Ruby in production applications. Behavior-driven development is an idea built on top of TDD. The idea is to write tests as specifications of system behavior.