Rails vs Spring-Boot

Overview

Rails

Stacks20.2K

Followers13.8K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars57.8K

Forks22.0K

Spring Boot

Stacks26.7K

Followers24.3K

Votes1.0K

GitHub Stars78.9K

Forks41.6K

Rails vs Spring-Boot: What are the differences?

Introduction

In the world of web development, two popular frameworks stand out: Rails and Spring-Boot. Both frameworks are widely used for building web applications, but they have distinct differences that make them suitable for different purposes. Let's explore the key differences between Rails and Spring-Boot.

Language and Ecosystem: Rails is built using Ruby, a dynamic, object-oriented scripting language, while Spring-Boot is built using Java, a statically-typed, object-oriented programming language. Ruby is known for its simplicity and elegance, making Rails a developer-friendly framework. On the other hand, Java has a mature ecosystem and is widely used in enterprise applications.
Convention Over Configuration vs. Configuration Over Convention: Rails follows the principle of "Convention Over Configuration," where the framework makes assumptions about how the application is structured. This allows for rapid development and reduces the need for manual configurations. Spring-Boot, on the other hand, follows the principle of "Configuration Over Convention," giving developers more control over the configuration of the application. This can be beneficial in complex projects where a high level of customization is required.
Database Integration: Rails comes with an integrated object-relational mapping (ORM) framework called ActiveRecord, which simplifies database operations by mapping database tables to Ruby objects. Spring-Boot, on the other hand, supports multiple ORM frameworks, such as Hibernate, MyBatis, and Spring Data JPA, giving developers more flexibility in choosing the right tool for their project.
Scalability and Performance: Rails is known for its ease of use and quick development time, making it suitable for smaller applications or prototypes. However, as the application grows in size and complexity, Rails may face performance issues. Spring-Boot, being built on Java, offers better scalability and performance, making it a preferred choice for large-scale enterprise applications.
Community and Support: Rails has a strong and passionate community, which results in extensive documentation, tutorials, and gems (libraries) available for developers. However, Spring-Boot has a much larger community and is widely adopted in the enterprise world. This means that developers using Spring-Boot can leverage a broad range of resources and support from the Java community.
Deployment and Hosting: Rails applications are typically deployed using a service such as Heroku, which simplifies the deployment process. Spring-Boot applications can be deployed in various ways, including traditional application servers or containerized with Docker. This allows for more flexibility and choice in hosting options for Spring-Boot applications.

In Summary, Rails is a developer-friendly framework with a strong community, suitable for smaller applications and rapid development. Spring-Boot, on the other hand, offers better scalability, performance, and flexibility in enterprise applications, leveraging the extensive Java ecosystem.

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Advice on Rails, Spring Boot

Shivam

AVP - Business at VAYUZ Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Mar 25, 2020

Needs adviceon

Node.js

Java

Rails

Hi Community! Trust everyone is keeping safe. I am exploring the idea of building a #Neobank (App) with end-to-end banking capabilities. In the process of exploring this space, I have come across multiple Apps (N26, Revolut, Monese, etc) and explored their stacks in detail. The confusion remains to be the Backend Tech to be used?

What would you go with considering all of the languages such as Node.js Java Rails Python are suggested by some person or the other. As a general trend, I have noticed the usage of Node with React on the front or Node with a combination of Kotlin and Swift. Please suggest what would be the right approach!

915k views915k

Comments

Ben

May 19, 2020

Decided

As a small team, we wanted to pick the framework which allowed us to move quickly. There's no option better than Rails. Not having to solve the fundamentals means we can more quickly build our feature set. No other framework can beat ActiveRecord in terms of integration & ease-of use. To top it all of, there's a lot of attention paid to security in the framework, making almost everything safe-by-default.

482k views482k

Comments

Felipe

May 24, 2020

Decided

Since I came from python I had two choices: #django or #flask. It felt like it was a better idea to go for #django considering I was building a blogging platform, this is kind of what #django was made for. On the other hand, #rails seems to be a fantastic framework to get things done. Although I do not regret any of my time spent on developing with #django I want to give @{#rails}|topic:null| a try some day in the future for the sake of curiosity.

438k views438k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Rails	Spring Boot
Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.	Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57.8K	GitHub Stars 78.9K
GitHub Forks 22.0K	GitHub Forks 41.6K
Stacks 20.2K	Stacks 26.7K
Followers 13.8K	Followers 24.3K
Votes 5.5K	Votes 1.0K
Pros & Cons
Pros 860 Rapid development 653 Great gems 607 Great community 486 Convention over configuration 418 Mvc Cons 24 Too much "magic" (hidden behavior) 14 Poor raw performance 12 Asset system is too primitive and outdated 6 Bloat in models 6 Heavy use of mixins	Pros 149 Powerful and handy 134 Easy setup 128 Java 90 Spring 85 Fast Cons 23 Heavy weight 18 Annotation ceremony 13 Java 11 Many config files needed 5 Reactive
Integrations
Ruby	Spring Java

What are some alternatives to Rails, Spring Boot?

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix is a framework for building HTML5 apps, API backends and distributed systems. Written in Elixir, you get beautiful syntax, productive tooling and a fast runtime.

MEAN

MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) is a boilerplate that provides a nice starting point for MongoDB, Node.js, Express, and AngularJS based applications. It is designed to give you a quick and organized way to start developing MEAN based web apps with useful modules like Mongoose and Passport pre-bundled and configured.

Related Comparisons

Rails vs Spring-Boot: What are the differences?

Introduction

Language and Ecosystem: Rails is built using Ruby, a dynamic, object-oriented scripting language, while Spring-Boot is built using Java, a statically-typed, object-oriented programming language. Ruby is known for its simplicity and elegance, making Rails a developer-friendly framework. On the other hand, Java has a mature ecosystem and is widely used in enterprise applications.
Convention Over Configuration vs. Configuration Over Convention: Rails follows the principle of "Convention Over Configuration," where the framework makes assumptions about how the application is structured. This allows for rapid development and reduces the need for manual configurations. Spring-Boot, on the other hand, follows the principle of "Configuration Over Convention," giving developers more control over the configuration of the application. This can be beneficial in complex projects where a high level of customization is required.
Database Integration: Rails comes with an integrated object-relational mapping (ORM) framework called ActiveRecord, which simplifies database operations by mapping database tables to Ruby objects. Spring-Boot, on the other hand, supports multiple ORM frameworks, such as Hibernate, MyBatis, and Spring Data JPA, giving developers more flexibility in choosing the right tool for their project.
Scalability and Performance: Rails is known for its ease of use and quick development time, making it suitable for smaller applications or prototypes. However, as the application grows in size and complexity, Rails may face performance issues. Spring-Boot, being built on Java, offers better scalability and performance, making it a preferred choice for large-scale enterprise applications.
Community and Support: Rails has a strong and passionate community, which results in extensive documentation, tutorials, and gems (libraries) available for developers. However, Spring-Boot has a much larger community and is widely adopted in the enterprise world. This means that developers using Spring-Boot can leverage a broad range of resources and support from the Java community.
Deployment and Hosting: Rails applications are typically deployed using a service such as Heroku, which simplifies the deployment process. Spring-Boot applications can be deployed in various ways, including traditional application servers or containerized with Docker. This allows for more flexibility and choice in hosting options for Spring-Boot applications.

Rails vs Spring-Boot

Overview