Top 5 Reasons to Use Ruby on Rails for Your Next Ecommerce Project
Let us ask you a question — who is the richest man in the world? If you are wondering what this question has to do with the topic of this article, we understand. It just happens that the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, made his fortune in e-commerce. With the ecommerce industry growing every day, there is no doubt that there is even more money to be made in this field in the future. New online stores appear every day and countless entrepreneurs and businesses move to the ecommerce world.
If you are one of them, and you’re already working on an ecommerce project or are planning to launch one soon you might be wondering what technologies and platform to use for building your online store. In this article, we will demonstrate why Ruby on Rails (RoR) may actually be the best choice for your ecommerce project, why it’s a great idea to hire Ruby developers, and what key advantages of Ruby you will enjoy.
Simple Syntax — Faster Development
The most important advantage of Ruby and its corresponding framework Rails is their simplicity. The creators of Ruby strived to make the syntax resemble the English language as closely as possible to make it easy to learn and code in Ruby. The structure of the syntax is logical and easy to understand. This allows developers to get more things done with fewer code lines.
Another important advantage to emphasize it the readability of the syntax. This minimizes the need for comments in the code. This simplifies collaboration between team members participating in your ecommerce project. All of these things speed up development and developers’ productivity. Therefore, if choosing Ruby for your online store, you can expect to save a significant amount of time and money.
Stability and Easy Maintenance
RoR is perhaps the most stable and predictable framework in the world. Maintaining the current code and implementing new changes is easy and quick. Ecommerce websites usually require regular maintenance and upgrades. For this reason, choosing RoR for your store will rid you of a constant headache related to fixing bugs, maintaining the code, and adding the necessary changes.
Also, if you have new people join the project who will have to deal with the code, they will be able to easily familiarize themselves with the current code and add new changes. With some other languages and frameworks, adding changes is very difficult and can often result in additional friction, bugs, costs, and other problems. With Ruby, you won’t have to worry about any of these.
Cost Savings
Low development costs compared to other technologies is another important advantage of RoR. First, RoR is an MIT open source framework which runs on Linux. This means you won’t have to pay any licensing fees. In addition, there is a variety of free libraries available in open access in places like GitHub.
Secondly, as we have already mentioned, Ruby provides you with a faster development time which means that development costs are much lower. Furthermore, the ease of maintenance and change implementation rids you of additional costs associated with any fixes and updates.
Enhanced Security
We all know how important security is to ecommerce. It directly affects the trust and loyalty of your customers. In our days, the absence of security means the absence of sales. Therefore, the question of security is something you must seriously consider when selecting the technology for building your online store.
A significant degree of security functions is integrated into the core of the framework by default. Building with RoR also implies adhering to the so-called Secure Development Lifecycle which provides security to your project. With this being said, we must nevertheless admit that there exist certain security weaknesses in the framework. However, they can be easily overcome.
The Abundance of CMS Solutions for Ruby
Using Ruby does not mean you will have to build your online store’s architecture from scratch. Fortunately, there are numerous ecommerce content management systems (CMS) for RoR. We are just going to list the most popular ones:
- Alchemy
- Spina
- Locomotive
- Camaleon
- Solidus
- Spree Commerce
- Fae
- Storytime
- PushType
This is just a tiny fraction of all the CMS available out there. Such an abundance of CMS solutions for RoR will definitely simplify your development process. Undoubtedly, you will be able to select the right CMS which will specifically tailor to your needs.
Conclusion
Selecting the right technology for your ecommerce project can either break it or make it successful. Therefore, it is worth taking your time to find the right solution which will fit your project’s requirements. Ruby on Rails may be a great solution for many ecommerce projects including yours. Easy syntax and fast development, easy maintenance and change implementation, cost-effectiveness, enhanced security and the vast availability of ecommerce CMS make this framework worth being considered for your current or next ecommerce project.
