Ruby is an object-oriented language that sums up important features of other languages, while Rails is an application framework built around the Ruby language. Ruby on Rails has quite a number of benefits that make it appealing for startups.

Ruby on Rails is an open-source software used to build web applications. Rails is a framework used to create websites using the general-purpose programming language Ruby.

Why is it used ?

• It’s time-efficient. Ruby on Rails contains many ready-made plugins and modules, which allow developers not to waste time on writing boilerplate code.

• It’s consistent. Developers follow standardized file storage and programming conventions that keep a project structured and readable. It also saves plenty of time.

• It provides excellent quality and promotes bug-free development. The Minitest tool built into the Rails core is a comprehensive test suite that provides many useful testing features including expectation syntax, test benchmarking, and mocking.

• It’s secure. Some security features are built into the framework and enabled by default.

• There is no Iteration in the Process.

Ruby on Rails Tools

Brakeman

A security analysis tool for your Rails applications. It scans through your application and outputs a nicely formatted table of possible vulnerabilities. Security warnings are grouped according to their severity (High, Medium and Low).

Guard

A tool that is frequented by large numbers of web designers, software developers and others working in similar fields, Guard is a great means to avoid mundane, repetitive actions and commands. It automates different tasks which are based on custom rules every time files or directories are modified. It helps do away with mundane actions and comments such as “relaunching” after changing configurations or source files.

Omniauth

When an app requires authentication from more than one provider the best tool to use is Omniauth. Using the tool it is possible to log in to the websites. It acts like a black box that runs a middleware after getting redirected from an external website.

Rubycritic

It creates nicely structured HTML files so you can browse through your smelly code and start refactoring. Out of all of the mentioned static code analysis tools, because of it's nice output, it's most convenient to overview and comment with your colleagues.

Deadweight

Deadweight is used for cleaning unused CSS selectors. You have to hand out a set of your application's style sheets and HTML pages, and it will report which CSS selectors are safe to remove.

The gem won’t work out of the box in Rails, since most pages have dynamic content, but Jason Morrison from Thoughtbot wrote a blog post on how to create a Rack Middleware and integrate it into your test suite to collect all the HTML content in one place.

Webpacker

It enables a stress-free connection between Rails and React, regardless of the asset pipeline system built into Rails.

Hutch

It is a very useful tool for connecting microservices. The developer is required to perform it in an asynchronous manner leveraging RabbitMQ. With the help of this tool developers don’t need to worry about any possible interruptions in communication as all the messages are safely stored in queues that can be retrieved later on even if the system fails.

Scenic

Scenic makes working with PostgreSQL more pleasant by extending ActiveRecord with the possibility of creating database views in the form of migration. It gives us the ability to refer to these views as standard associations.

Opal

Opal lets you run Ruby on a browser. It is a Ruby to Javascript compiler that runs on any browser. In other words, it translates the Ruby that you write into Javascript. Additionally, it is also a runtime implantation and a corelib. Opal paired with the Guard gem makes the development process a lot easier.

Sinatra

Sinatra is a tremendously simple, free and open-source software web application library. It is perfect for writing domain-specific web applications with incredible ease. Well documented and easy to get started, Sinatra is great especially for developing smaller applications that need to run fast.

Pry-remote

It is considered one of the most advanced Ruby debugger tools available. However, not many developers are familiar with this tool. It helps in performing remote debugging leveraging the DRb protocol. It allows developers to stop the execution of the program running in the background.

ActiveHash

When the logic of our web application is based on static data, we can store it in the form of entries in yaml files stored in the repository. ActiveHash provides us with mapping this data through a model very similar to ActiveRecord. Associations with ActiveRecord are also possible.

httparty

httparty is a simple way of rolling out your own API client. You can include it in a class of your own and you’re instantly able to perform all kinds of HTTP requests, auto-parsing JSON responses, handle SSL certificates, perform basic authentication, handle the responses as streams and much more.