When comparing Ruby on Rails vs Spark, the Slant community recommends Ruby on Rails for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Ruby on Rails is ranked 5th while Spark is ranked 41st. The most important reason people chose Ruby on Rails is:
The sheer scale and massive number of developers using Rails has produced a large number of guides, tutorials, plugins, documentation, videos and anything that can help new and old Rails developers.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Massive community with lots of tutorials and guides
The sheer scale and massive number of developers using Rails has produced a large number of guides, tutorials, plugins, documentation, videos and anything that can help new and old Rails developers.
Pro Many plugins (gems) available
There are many third-party plugins (Ruby gems) available for Rails development. The larger ones and those that have a lot of downloads and users are very well documented and easy to use.
Pro Ruby is a nice readable language
Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters.
presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"]
for ss in 0...presidents.length
print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n";
end
Pro Good conventions
MVC is a great starting point, and perfect for APIs. You'll rarely if ever have to wonder "where should I put this code?"
Pro Small projects are very easy and it's possible to finish one in very little time
The large number of documentation, tutorials, videos and guides which help new developers who are just starting with Rails make it seem very easy to create a small and simple application by relying on code generation and components that come out of the box with Rails.
Pro Cool language
Pro Supported on every major cloud or VPS hosting service
Rails is supported on every major Cloud hosting service nowadays. There are also countless tutorials that help developers deploy their Rails apps if there are any problems on the way.
Pro Meta-programming capabilities
Pro Custom quick swipe features
Pro Free
Pro Robust customization options
Pro Syncs across devices
Pro Unified inbox
Pro Free snooze options
Cons
Con Learning curve seems low at first, but starts becoming steeper
Rails' simplicity is deceptive. It's learning curve is really low at first, and the huge number of tutorials and guides out there for starting with Rails make it even easier. But it starts getting harder and harder as apps become more complicated. If good code conventions and OO design are not followed, then the codebase will be all over the place and it becomes impossible to maintain it.
Con Too much magic
So much behavior is implemented with dynamic behind-the-scenes changes to existing classes that obscure bugs are way too common. Conflicting interactions between multiple plugins that both try to change the same objects are a particularly pernicious example.
Con Too much convention
Con Not a very popular language outside of web development
Con Bad performance
Among the slowest frameworks. If you want to scale, you will have to migrate to another land.
Con Horrible privacy policy
- Sends statistical data to several services known for bad privacy policies (Google, Facebook), also there's no way to opt out.
- Automatically creates an acount with the first address entered and subscribes you to their newsletter.
- Stores credentials for your email accounts on their servers.
- Stores your emails on their servers to push them to your devices.
- Server infrastructure seems to be located in the US.
Con Doesn't support many services
Many services such as Spam filters, Pocket, and other apps are not supported.
Con Doesn't show the counts of emails next to the folders
- On the Mac platform will show +999 for the folder that contains more than 1000 emails.
- On the iPhone, the platform will not show the counts next to the folder unless they are new emails.
