What Is Ruby Used for? - 21 Most Common Applications!

Every year there are dozens of articles around the web, both from the developers’ point of view and the app founders, talking about using the latest technologies. We always try to showcase which technology stack allows you to build the most solid and optimal solutions across different industries, be it in terms of security, scalability, ease of use, and many other factors that play a huge role in the app development process.

And while there are tons of programming languages, Ruby stands out the most for simplicity and productivity. And both these factors help the developers and founders reach their full potential and goals faster!

What Is Ruby and Why Should You Use It?     

Ruby is a dynamic, popular, and open-source programming language highly focused on productivity due to its elegant syntax that is very similar to the natural way of reading or writing. Additionally, it also makes it easier for the top Ruby on Rails developers to develop secure web applications.

What Is the Difference Between Ruby and Ruby on Rails?
Ruby on Rails (known as RoR) is a web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License that helps developers to build web apps and sites through a clean structure to write the code and simplifies common repetitive tasks.

What Is Ruby Used For?

Ruby is a programming language that is most used for web applications, databases and parsing, servers, e-commerce, content management, prototyping, and many other types of applications. This means that any Ruby developer can do the following:

• Full-stack web development
• DevOps tools (such as Homebrew), Servers Backups, and automation
• Web crawling and/or web scraping
• Static website generator
• Parsing, filtering, and data cleaning 
• API Clients 
• Report generators

While there are lots of programming languages out there (such as JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, just to name a few), Ruby has a few benefits that we, as web developers, definitely love:

1. Powerful community: for any programming language, the community around it plays a huge role in its development and adoption. Ruby Gems is the Ruby community’s gem hosting service - basically, the place where developers worldwide instantly publish their libraries, add-ons, or snippets of code (known as gems) so the whole community could rely on them when needed.
2. Consistency and clean code: the syntax is very elegant and similar to the natural form of writing, which helps to create a clean code that needs less refactoring for the long term, and no matter how many developers (or teams) will work on a product they will fully understand the code at any point - so it is also time-efficient and easier to handle during handovers. 
3. Another benefit of having such a great syntax and readable code is that the entire Ruby code can be self-describing, making the development team efficient as they will not need to write additional tedious documentation.
4. Do not Repeat Yourself (DRY): Ruby is built in such a way that once you have a repetitive task, say several forms or tables, it helps back-end developers to reuse them an unlimited number of times, instead of repeating the code snippets.
5. Flexibility, speed, and High scalability: because of its easy syntax, it encourages teamwork, and a high number of developers can work on the same digital product without breaking (too many) things fast. Everyone can easily understand the code, so it is faster and more flexible to use it as a team. Additionally, Ruby is an object-oriented language with a scripting syntax, making back-end scripts extremely flexible to work with digital products built in any other programming language.
6. Security: We live in a data-driven world, and security breaches are amongst the most common challenges for any digital product and its customers. Using Ruby, developers can ensure they will develop protected applications in terms of SQL-injections and XSS attacks. Not to mention that RubyGems has a great list of gems addressing multiple types of security threats, and any developer can use them at any point is needed. 
7. Test environment: while people were used to one or maybe to environments to drop their code. Ruby has three environments by default: development, testing, and production. So, every piece of code gets reviewed and tested quite a few times before being deployed and going live (in production). This ensures higher code quality and fewer issues for the customer-facing apps.
8. Convention over configuration: most programming languages have a tedious process for files’ configuration, while Ruby reduced the time a lot by using this key principle of using conventions. This ensures that the code base will be readable and straightforward, and easy to navigate through it.

Projects built with Ruby and Ruby on Rails

Chef. Infrastructure Automation for Hardened, Consistent Configuration at Any Scale. Chef Infra automates infrastructure configuration, ensuring every system is configured correctly and consistently.

Homebrew: A solution that installs the stuff you need that Apple (or your Linux system) while using simple Ruby Scripts.

Rails: Needless to say that this is the most popular web framework for Ruby.

Dicourse: It is a 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. Use it as a mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and more!

Wrapping Up!

When it comes to Ruby on Rails, as they also mention on their site, there is a very high chance of you already using (or used) many of the applications built with Ruby on Rails. Here are some of the popular ones: 

1. 500px
2. Airbnb
3. Basecamp
4. Cookpad
5. Dribbble
6. Fiverr
7. GitHub
8. Goodreads
9. HEY
10. Hulu
11. Kickstarter
12. MyFitnessPal
13. Shopify
14. SoundCloud
15. Square
16. Twitch
17. Zendesk