Ruby vs. JavaScript
Why is Ruby popular in web development?
- The growing demand for Ruby on Rails has been driven by successful companies who benefit from the speed and agility of building applications in Rails, which results in increased productivity and company growth.
- Most cost-effective approach as compared to other development environments and frameworks. Because of the speed with which Rails sites can be built and modified, you spend less money to create and maintain the website — without compromising the quality, performance, or scalability of your site.
- Ruby is known as an easier language to learn and work with in comparison to JavaScript and other programming languages.
- Ruby on Rails is a fully-featured web framework that comes with a lot of configuration decisions baked in. This allows developers who use it to skip a lot of the setup and boilerplate code that are common to most web applications, and start writing the code specific to their application as quickly as possible.
What are the great things about Ruby?
- Ruby on Rails is a fully-featured web framework that comes with a lot of configuration decisions baked in.
- Ruby allows developers to write less code while accomplishing more than many other languages and frameworks.
- Significant Cost Savings: Ruby on Rails is essentially a free development toolkit, which runs on a free operating system (Linux) and works with multiple databases and web servers (most of which are free).
- Rapid Development: Ruby on Rails is a rapid application development tool which allows us to model out website features quickly. We can go from modeling and estimating to actual development very rapidly.
- Collaboration: The Ruby development community is extremely active and responsive. People are constantly developing code for talking with other APIs; as such, our developers have a much larger and more diverse toolkit to lean on.
- Ruby has a terser syntax and often requires much, much less effort to get the same tasks done as they would require in Java.
- Ruby has a built-in testing framework and encourages good programming patterns and agile development process.
What are the limitations of Ruby?
- Ruby is often slower to run and requires more memory than JavaScript.
- Rails development in a Windows environment is not as well supported as on a Mac.
Why is JavaScript popular in web development?
- JavaScript is a powerful, complicated, and often misunderstood computer language. It enables the rapid development of applications in which users can enter data and view results easily.
- JavaScript is a scripting language that works well across all platforms and browsers and thereby is popular among developers. Javscript is the defacto client side language of browsers.
- JavaScript is an object oriented language that is easier to learn and adapt than other programming languages.
- JavaScript has a huge online community that you can get help and assistnace with
What are the great things about JavaScript?
- The primary advantage to JavaScript, which is also known as ECMAScript, centers around the Web browser, thus having the ability to produce the same results on all platforms supported by the browser. In essence, JavaScript provides cross-browser support.
- JavaScript language is executed on the client side rather than server side and as a result, it is a faster and more responsive language that increase performance and reduces network latency. Via JavaScript, all HTML rendering happens in the browser, keeping communication with the server fast and to a minimum.
- Third part add-ons are available to extend functionality to web pages and enhance user experience
What are the limitations of JavaScript?
- Security Issues. Javascript snippets, once appended onto web pages execute on client servers immediately and therefore can also be used to exploit the user's system. While a certain restriction is set by modern web standards on browsers, malicious code can still be executed complying with the restrictions set.
- JavaScript rendering varies. JavaScript is sometimes interpreted differently by different browsers.
How to Choose Between Ruby and JavaScript
- Time to market and scalability. If you need faster time to market and handle scalability, Ruby has been the popular choice. Ruby on Rails allows internal development groups to be more productive and accelerate their development projects as compared to building in Java.
- Ruby has emphasized productivity and attractiveness over conceptually small, well-understood code, whereas Javascript is focused on composing smaller pieces into larger, well-understood programs.
- Rails is especially well suited for applications that perform a lot of CRUD actions (create, read, update, destroy) on a collection of items of a single type, as posts for a blog, or tweets for a Twitter stream.
- For websites that require lots of simultaneous activity, Ruby is not well-suited to the sophisticated software engineering required to execute simultaneous activity efficiently.
- Lastly, Ruby is more modern and more flexible: it supports many different programming paradigms, whereas Java is strictly OOP.
Example Usage of Ruby and JavaScript
Functions
Functions in JavaScript are the same as methods in Ruby. The syntax of declaring a function vs. declaring a method is slightly different.
- Ruby Syntax: Use "def" to define a function
- JavaScript Syntax: Use "function" to define a function
Arrays
Both Ruby and JavaScript have Arrays, which are more of less logically the same; however, the Object Array functions (JavaScript) and the Class Array methods (Ruby) have different syntax.
- Ruby Syntax: Use array_name.index("element") to find the index of an element in an array.
- JavaScript Syntax: Use arrayName.indexOf("element"); to find the index of an element in an array.
Other Examples of Syntax Difference Between Ruby vs. JavaScript