Choosing between NodeJS or Ruby on Rails can be a complicated task for most of the developers. Ruby on Rails has been winning developers hearts for many years, but nowadays NodeJS is also equally preferred. So now developers are torn between node js and Rails. Both Rails And NodeJS have their own set of pros and cons.

Let’s discuss the benefits and hindrances of developing a web application either by using Ruby on Rails or Node JS.

NodeJS

Unlike Ruby on Rails, NodeJS cannot be considered as a framework. It is a runtime or environment. It is an open source platform built on Javascript runtime. Through Super-fast interpreter that runs on Chrome browser, NodeJS enables event-driven programming. It is perfect for data-intensive real-time applications.

Pros:

• It provides you asynchronous event-driven I/O API’s which allows handling thousands of concurrent requests.
• It is written in Javascript and extremely easy to learn if you already know Javascript.
• We can use the same code for server-side and client side. Javascript can be used on both Web Server and browser.
• It is well documented and supported by an enthusiastic community.
• Streaming big files will be extremely easy by using NodeJS. You can load multiple files at the same time
• It is really fast; When compared to Ruby it is extremely fast.

Cons:

• One should have deep knowledge of Javascript to understand NodeJS. It might be tough for a beginner to start with NodeJS without deep knowledge of Javascript.
• It is single threaded, Sometimes CPU bound tasks can cause delays. This is the reason why NodeJS is not recommended for computation-heavy systems.
• The tools are not well documented, and some are of really poor quality.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby On Rails is a Server-side web application framework written in Ruby.

Pros:

• It is written in ruby and very easy to learn. The code in ruby is easily readable. It also doesn’t consider semicolons, whitespaces, etc;
• There are many “Ruby Gems” available that makes the process very easier.
• There is a large community who contribute their code to Rails and Ruby Gems.
• Learning Ruby on Rails doesn’t need any experience in other programming languages. A beginner too can learn it easily.
• The Active-Record framework in Rails saves objects into the database. It facilitates the creation and use of objects whose data is to be stored in a database.
• Many large applications like GitHub, Zendesk, Shopify and more are developed using Ruby on Rails, This makes us trust it a little more.
• The Convention Over Configuration in Ruby on Rails facilitates the development of the program using native procedures and functions of the language. It reduces the need for too many configurations.
• The extendable test code is created automatically while creating models and controllers. It provides supporting code, That makes writing and running test cases much easier.
• Metaprogramming technique is used to write code. By using this technique, one program can be used as data to generate, read and transform other programs.

Cons:

• Runtime Value of Rails is relatively slow when compared to Node JS.
• Even though many Gems are available, It can be hard to find a good documentation for them.
• Boot time is likely to increase with the increase of gems dependencies and files.
• It supports multithreading even though some of the I/O libraries that keep hold of GIL(Global Interpreter Lock) doesn’t support Multithreading. This might lead to requests queuing up behind active requests.

Advocating one in both of this can be tough. But apart from weighing these pros and cons, we have to consider the needs of the web application we are going to build. And decide whether to consider NodeJS or Ruby on Rails. But we personally consider that NodeJS can be the best option if you are developing a data-driven real-time application and for applications which require high scalability and speed. We at Agira technologies are experts in both Ruby on Rails and NodeJS, depending on the project we choose one of them.