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How To Hire Ruby on Rails Developer and How Much Does it Cost

Posted on April 10, 2018 by Jay

Ruby on Rails is one of the most amazing and popular framework to develop full-featured web applications rapidly. It is pretty simple for a ruby on rails developer (beginner) to start and achieve to build a robust application within a very short time.

Ruby is an object-oriented programming language with a syntax that was expressly designed with a productive mind. Any good programmer can be a very productive ruby on rails developer.

No doubt ruby on rails is an excellent choice for your application development.

Ruby is a very powerful language… it is natural that when you start your first project, you get carried away by the productivity the language gives you and don’t worry about Ruby’s best practices.

– José Valim

So, now the question arises how and from where you will hire a good RoR developer for your project? And what are the things you need to consider at the time of your hiring?

Wrong hiring can lead to a disastrous outcome. Make sure your developer must have a huge knowledge of ruby and its various versions.

Tips To Hire Ruby on Rails Developer

Before sharing some quick tips on how you can go for hiring. Let’s have a look at where you can get good developers.

Normally, you can get qualified and experienced developers in multiple sources like job search websites, RoR communities, social networks, specialized events like rails programmers meeting place and application development agency like Andolasoft

1. Experience and Specialization Matters a lot:

It’s always beneficial for you if you will go with specialized and experienced developers. He or she must have adequate knowledge in understanding ruby, understanding the MVC pattern and understanding about the smart object-oriented model properly.

There is no substitute for a perfect experience!

Experience developers take the help of tools like GitHub and bitbucket to manage their codes and ensuring that your code will be secured from external threats. They also use project management tools (like Orangescrum) for the smoother operation and collaboration of project works with the team and you.

So don’t consider developers having minimum experience or the agencies with low industry experience.

2. Know what Challenges they are taking

According to the latest trends and user requirements, too many new challenges are coming in the day-to-day life for ruby on rails developer. Among all challenges building and testing new application features, optimizing user experience, product development road map creation are the major.

You must judge the developer how he/she is getting out from these day to day challenges and what best practices he/she is adopting to take you to the next level.

3. Approach and Flexibility Towards Work

The analytical skill of a developer is very important for the work. It’s all about the process and commitment of the RoR agency matching your goal.

The most important thing is how they are comfortable to update and modify the new features and fix various issues continuously. Flexibility for adoption is the most important thing to ensure a long-term relationship for customer satisfaction.

We at Andolasoft are very much flexible and adopt a decent approach to all.

4. Work Portfolio and Customer Review:

A good developer and perfect application development agency would never hesitate to share their previous work (portfolio) with prospects. Work portfolio carries a mark and establishes trust with the potential customers.

Never forget to check the reviews of the developer or the software development agency has won from various sources. By going through the reviews you can know the real-time experience of customers. This is another kind of trust you get, which is convincing and appreciable too.

Hope the tips above can help you to select a right ruby on rails developer for your dream project.

Hiring world-class Ruby on Rails developers is not so difficult. Hire Us Now

So now coming to the second point and it’s time to think how much does it cost to hire a Ruby developer? You like this question, isn’t it?

The development pricing of your project completely depends on your requirement, the level of expertise you require, and the overall scope of your project. You need to ask the developer or the application development company about their packages and you need to decide whether you are comfortable with their pricing.

Before taking any decision, make sure to check the average rates or per hour rate of a Ruby on Rails Developer to cross-check whether your Developer is charging you too much!.

We are at Andolasoft has three engagement models such as Dedicated/Full-stack Developer, Fixed bid and Time & Material to develop your project. We are flexible and affordable too in comparison to others. Stay assured that there are no hidden charges.

We are not just pitching, but more committed towards quality delivery to your satisfaction.

Good reasons why to hire Andolasoft Ruby on Rails developer? Let’s have a free consultation.

Conclusion:

Choosing the right and experienced ruby on rails developer is not a big deal. However, you need to use your good sense by doing some research over the internet. Hope the above tips would definitely help you lot while selecting the developer for your dream app. And a good application development company would guide you 100% in selecting the best ones with cost-effective price.

At Andolasoft we have a team of ruby on rails developer and we are delivering successful applications to our global customers according to their business requirement from the last 10 years. Wakeupsales our CRM product is the best example of our ruby on rails development work.

What is stopping you? Hire Us Now!

Rails Or Django – Which One To Choose?

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Srikant M.

Python and Ruby are the most popular dynamic programming languages. Developers are using these two languages for high-level application development. Python and Ruby are popular among web developers because of their rapid development cycle.

Here, I have discussed the most important difference between Python and Ruby:

Philosophy

Python has been designed to emphasize the programmer’s productivity and code readability. The philosophy of Python requires almost everything explicitly defined by a programmer, whereas Ruby allows programmers to reuse the in-built components in development.

The philosophy behind Ruby is that programmers should have the flexibility and privilege to write concise and compact code.

Functional Programming

Both Rails and Django use object-relational mapping to link the application to the underlying database. In Django, the developer is required to explicitly specify each attribute of every class.

But, In rails, all module attributes are not defined in the class definition. A developer can retrieve all the information from the database based on the class name.

In Rails database migrations is very easy and in-built compared to Django, as it uses third party library like South.

Convention over Configuration

Ruby on Rails defines certain features that make web programming more effective and user-friendly. Convention over configuration (CoC) is one of the important features of Rails.

“Convention over Configuration” means a developer only needs to specify unconventional aspects of the application. There are some predefined layout and sensible defaults available in rails projects.

All components such as models, controllers, and static CSS and JavaScript files are located in standard sub-directories and you just need to drop your implementation files into those directories.

CoC saves a lot of time of developers because in rails you don’t need to write the same code again and again.

While in Django, you have to specify the path where the component files are located. So the development cycles in Rails are shorter as compared to it’s counterparts.

Model-View-Controller and REST

Ruby on Rails is unique because it supports the REST protocol. It helps you to organize your application. In Rails, all model objects are accessed and handled in a uniform manner using the standard HTTP verbs like getting, PUT, DELETE, and POST.

CSS, JavaScript and images

Rails have an in-built asset pipeline. Rails’ asset pipeline is having feature of minifying, concatenating and compressing JavaScript and CSS files. Not only that, it also supports other languages such as Coffeescript, Sass and ERB.

Django’s support of assets it very amateurish compared to Rails and leaves everything to the developer. Django offers static files, which basically collects all static files from each application to a single location.

URL mapping

Both Rails and Django allow for the use of regular expressions to customize the mapping of URLs to controller actions. Both are flexible enough to allow you to create pretty much any mapping scheme you wish.
But, Rails does automatic URL mapping based on the class and function names within controllers by default.

Testing

Testing is very easy in Rails and there’s a much stronger emphasis on it in Rails than in Django.

Popularity

Python is generally more widely used than Ruby. Due to the rising popularity of the Ruby on Rails Web application development framework, Ruby’s popularity to has seen rapid growth.

Both Rails and Django are effective web frameworks powered by efficient programming languages. However, Rails is the best platform for rapid web app development.

Andolasoft offers quality rails development service. We specialize in developing database-driven web applications in an efficient and hassle-free way.

Have something to add to this topic? Share it in the comments

What is TDD and BDD in Rails App Development

Posted on June 27, 2014 by Srikant M.

What Does “Testing” Means ?

Testing of a product of services is an investigation to find out how well it is working against the expectation. Thus the quality of product can be assessed. Whether computer hardware or software development, testing is done at key checkpoints in the overall process to determine whether objectives are being met.

What is TDD (Test-Driven Development) ?

TDD is a way of designing the code by writing a test which expresses what you intend the code to do. It defines a set of rules for developing software in which test cases are written before any code and the only code written will be enough to make the tests pass.

TDD is basically a software development technique that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle. In this technique, first the developer starts by writing a failing automated test case (Red), implement the simplest solution that will pass the test cases (Green) and then finally improves or refactor the code (Refactor).”RED-GREEN-REFACTOR” is the main agenda for TDD.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development process that focuses on writing tests before writing the actual code. The TDD cycle typically follows three steps:

Write a Test:
Developers begin by writing a test that defines the desired behavior of a particular piece of code. This test initially fails because the code to fulfill the behavior hasn’t been implemented yet.
Write Code:
Next, the developer writes the minimum amount of code necessary to make the test pass. This phase emphasizes simplicity and getting the code to work.
Refactor:
After the test passes, developers refactor the code to improve its quality, maintainability, and efficiency. This step ensures that the codebase remains clean and easy to maintain.

TDD is renowned for its ability to catch bugs early in the development process, enhance code quality, and provide clear documentation of how the code is intended to work.

Tools to use:
There are some popular gems available to implement TDD in Ruby on Rails like rspec-rails, capybara, factory_girl_rails, spork, launchy etc…

Example:
Below is the code snippet for writing controller tests, like this:

[sourcecode language=”plain”]
describe ArticlesController do
it "renders the index template" do
get :index
response.should render_template("index")
end
end[/sourcecode]

What is BDD (Behavior-Driven Development)?

BDD extends Test driven development by writing test cases in a way anyone can understand.With the help of BDD, software development is managed by both business interests and technical insight.

It focuses and associates behavioral specifications with each unit of software under development.

Basically BDD is an Agile software development technique that encourages collaboration between developers, QA and non-technical or business participants in a software project.

It extends TDD by writing test cases in a natural language that non-programmers can read. In other way it is like story writing.

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is an extension of TDD that focuses on the behavior of software from the user’s perspective.

BDD emphasizes collaboration between developers, testers, and business stakeholders to ensure that the software meets the desired behaviors and outcomes. Key components of BDD include:

Specifying Behavior:
In BDD, behaviors are specified using human-readable language, often in the form of “Given-When-Then” scenarios. These scenarios describe the expected behavior of the software from the user’s viewpoint.
Collaboration:
BDD promotes collaboration between technical and non-technical team members. Developers, testers, and business stakeholders work together to define and understand the software’s behavior.

Automated Testing: BDD scenarios are translated into automated tests that verify the desired behaviors. These tests serve as living documentation that ensures the software aligns with the intended behavior.

The main thing to know is that BDD is meant to eliminate issues that TDD might cause.

Tools to use:
Some popular gems are available to implement BDD in Rails are rpsec-rails, factory_girl_rails, cucumber-rails, guard-cucumber, mocha etc…

Example:
Below is the code snippet for writing the BDD:

[sourcecode language=”plain”]
#articles.feature
Given an article exists called "Testing Demonstration"
When I visit the list of articles
Then I should see an article called "Testing Demonstration"

#article_steps.rb
Given /^an article exists called "(.+)"$/ do |title|
FactoryGirl.create(:article, title: title)
end
When /^I visit the list of articles$/ do
visit articles_path
end
Then /^I should see an article called "(.+)"$/ do |title|
page.should have_content title
end
[/sourcecode]

TDD or BDD, which is better?
The main difference between TDD and BDD is the business readability factor. BDD’s main draw is that the specifications or features are separate from the test code, so the product owners can provide or review the specification without having to go through code.

TDD has a similar mechanism, but instead you describe a step with a Describe, Context or It block that contains the business specification, and then immediately have the code that executes that statement.

Few drawbacks of TDD are as follows:

Big time investment: For the simple case you lose about 20% of the actual implementation, but for complicated cases you lose much more.
Additional Complexity: For complex cases, test cases are harder to calculate.
Design Impacts: Sometimes the design is not clear at the start and evolves as you go along – this will force you to redo your test which will generate a big time lose.
Continuous Tweaking: For data structures and black box algorithms unit tests would be perfect, but for algorithms that tend to change, this can cause a big time investment that one might claim is not justified.

Benefits of TDD and BDD in Rails Development

Early Bug Detection:
TDD and BDD catch bugs at an early stage of development, reducing the likelihood of critical issues arising in production.
Enhanced Code Quality:
Writing tests before code enforces well-structured, modular, and maintainable code, resulting in a more robust application.
Clear Documentation:
Test cases serve as clear documentation of the code’s intended behavior, making it easier for developers to understand and work with the codebase.
Collaboration:
BDD encourages collaboration between technical and non-technical team members, leading to a shared understanding of requirements.
Regression Prevention:
Automated tests created through TDD and BDD ensure that new changes do not break existing functionalities.

Best Practices for TDD and BDD in Rails

Start Small:
Begin by writing tests for small, incremental features. This helps you master the TDD/BDD process and ensures a gradual buildup of test coverage.
Red-Green-Refactor:
Follow the TDD cycle religiously: write a failing test, make it pass with minimal code, then refactor to improve code quality.
Human-Readable Scenarios:
In BDD, use human-readable language to describe scenarios, making them understandable to all team members.
Automate Everything:
Automate your tests so that they can be executed frequently and consistently.
Maintain Test Suite:
Regularly maintain and update your test suite to reflect changes in requirements and keep it relevant.

Verdict

If you are the sole developer and a product owner too, then you should go for TDD. It’s easier for a technical person to understand, which is an advantage in keeping things scoped and under control. Thus keeps you out of messing up with RegExs for test steps. On the flip side, you should go with BDD, if you are building this for a client, and they are hands-on with regard to the specifications.

Hope you liked it. Go ahead and post your comments what you think about this?

5 Reasons Why Web Development is Faster With Ruby On Rails

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Jay

Ruby on Rails aka “RoR” is an open-source MVC framework built using the Ruby programming language.

It is considered as the epitome of the latest generation of high-productivity, open source web development tool. The growing demand for Ruby on Rails has been driven by successful RoR development companies like Andolasoft, who benefit from the speed and agility of building applications in Rails, which results in increased productivity and company growth.

1. Framework Built on Agile Methodology

RoR is faster because the framework was built based on Agile development methodology, best practices are emulated so web development is done with high quality and speed.

RoR framework includes support programs, compilers, code libraries, tool sets, and application programming interfaces (APIs) that bring together the different components to enable development of a project or solution.

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It’s possible to build sites that used to take 12 weeks in just 6 weeks using Ruby on Rails. It means you can save 50% on your development expenses.

2. Less Code Writing

Rails creates a skeleton for an application or module by executing all the code libraries. You must write some commands to accomplish this. This is what makes the process of web development faster.

Rails makes database deployments simpler than any open, or proprietary solution by allowing for migrations.

Adopting principle of DRY

It also adopts the principle of “Don’t Repeat Yourself”. So all information can be retrieved from a single unambiguous database which tends to easier development.
Easy Configuration

A key principle of Ruby on Rails development is convention over configuration. This means that the programmer does not have to spend a lot of time configuring files in order to get setup, Rails comes with a set of conventions which help speeding up development.
Modular Design

Ruby code is very readable and mostly self-documenting. This increases productivity, as there is little need to write out separate documentation, making it easier for other developers to pick up existing projects.
Designer Friendly Templates

HTML templates is a core feature of Rails. It allow templates to be composed of a base template that defines the overall layout of the page,the base template is called a “layout” while the individual page templates are “views”. The Rails application retrieves the list of tags from the database and makes it available to the view.The section of the view that renders these category is:
```
<%= render :partial => 'category' %>
```
This refers to a Ruby partial, a fragment of a page, which is contained in _category.html.erb. That file’s content is:

<h3>categories</h3>
<p class="categorylist">
<%= render :partial => 'categorylist', :collection => @category %>
</p>

This generates the heading then refers to another partial, which will be used once for each object in the collection named “categorylist”.

3. Third Party Plugin/Gem Support

Mature plugin architecture, well used by the growing community. Rails plugins allows developer to extend or override nearly any part of the Rails framework, and share these modifications with others in an encapsulated and reusable manner.

Rails community provides a wealth of plugins as Ruby Gems that you simply add to your project Gem-file and install. This significantly accelerates development and maintenance time as you’re not trying to integrate disparate libraries, it’s already done for you.

4. Automated Testing

Rails has developed a strong focus on testing, and has good testing suit in-built within the frameworks.

Rails makes it super easy to write your tests. It starts by producing skeleton test code while you are creating your models and controllers.

I’ve worked with the team at Andolasoft on multiple websites. They are professional, responsive, & easy to work with. I’ve had great experiences & would recommend their services to anyone.

Ruthie Miller, Sr. Mktg. Specialist

Salesforce, Houston, Texas

LEARN MORE

Rails ships with a built-in test suite. There are many tools available in the market for testing Rails application as mentioned below with other web apps from many different aspects.

Rspec
Cucumber
Test Unit
Shoulda
Selenium (not really a ruby thing but more of a web thing)

But if you are new to testing we highly recommend you start with learning Rails own testing suite before start using other tools

5. Easier Maintenance

Once site launches, future modifications to your site (e.g., adding new features, making changes to the data model) can be made more quickly, for the same reasons noted above.
New features can be added quickly and maintaining applications over time can also be more cost-effective.

If you like this one, you might also like Why Rails framework popular among Ruby developers and The Best practices for Rails App Development .

Memcached Vs Redis, Which One to Pick for Large Web App?

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Srikant M.

Introduction:

MemcacheD is easy yet powerful. It’s manageable design promotes fast deployment, ease of exaggeration, and solves many problems related to large data caches. It has its inbuilt APIs which provide a very large hash table distributed across multiple machines & uses internal memory management which is more efficient in the simplest use cases because it consumes comparatively less memory for metadata. MemcacheD supports only String data type which are ideal for storing read-only data.

Memcached is a volatile in-memory key-value origin. It is rude, multi-threaded and used primarily for caching objects.

Redis is an open source in-memory data structure store which also can be used as a database as well as caching. It supports almost all types of data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes through radius queries. Redis also can be used for messaging system used as pub/sub.

Internal Architecture:

Here are the key points to consider,

Installation:

Installing Redis is so much easier. No dependencies required.

Memory Usage:

MemcacheD’s internal memory supervision, while not exactly a substitute to Redis; Is more efficient because it consumes comparatively less memory resources for metadata. For easy key-value pairs, MemcacheD is more memory efficient than Redis. Redis is more memory efficient, only after you use Redis hashes.

Persistence:

If you are using MemcacheD, data might be lost with a restart and rebuilding cache is a costly process. On the other hand, Redis can handle persistent data. By default it syncs data to the disk at least every 2 seconds, offering optional & tuneable data persistence meant to bootstrap the cache after a planned shutdown or an unintentional failure. While we tend to regard the data in caches as volatile and transient, persisting data to disk can be quite valuable in caching scenarios.

Replication:

MemcacheD does not support replication, whereas Redis supports master-slave replication. It allows slave Redis servers to be the exact copies of master servers. Data from any Redis server can replicate to any number of slaves. Replication can be used for implementing a cache setup that can withstand failures and find the maintenance for uninterrupted facilitation to the application.

Storage type:

MemcacheD stores variables in its memory & retrieves any information directly from the server memory instead of hitting the database again. On the other hand, Redis is like a database that resides in memory. It executes (reads and writes) a key/value pair from its database to return the result set. Developers use Redis for real-time metrics & analytics too.

Read/Write Speed:

MemcacheD is very good to handle high traffic websites. It can read lots of information at a time and give you back at a great response time. Redis can neither handle high traffic on read nor heavy writes.

Data Structure:

MemcacheD uses strings and integers in its data structure. Hence, everything you save can either be one or the other. With integers, the only data manipulation you can do is adding or subtracting them. If you need to save arrays or objects, you will have to serialize them first and then save them. To read them back, you will need to un-serialize.

In comparison Redis has stronger data structures, which can handle not only strings & integers but also binary-safe strings, lists of binary-safe strings, sets of binary-safe strings and sorted sets.

Key Length:

MemcacheD’s key length has a maximum of 250 bytes, whereas Redis has a maximum of 2GB.

Here is the benchmarking result by DB-Engines, which clearly shows the leader.

Conclusion:

Use Redis, if you need to do operations on cached datasets at once or need to spread one enormous cache over a geographically challenged area. Read-write splitting against caching will enormously help performance and alleviate the cache connection starvation.

On the other hand, you might want to stick to Memcached for its simplicity, reliability and speed.

If you’re thinking anything on Ruby on Rails, get in touch with Andolasoft’s experts. Let’s convert your idea into an App.

Have something to add to this topic? Share it in the comments.

Enhance Speed of your web app with Backbone.js

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Srikant M.

Backbone.js is a popular open source JavaScript framework that allows us to develop single page web application. It offers a MVC framework for organizing Javascript application.

What is Backbone.js?

Building single-page web apps or complicated user interfaces will get extremely difficult by simply using JQuery alone. Because JavaScript libraries are great at what they do, without realizing it you can build an entire application without any formal structure. Whereas Backbone.js is a lightweight framework that allows us to create single page applications in a structured manner. Backbone.js enforces that communication to the server should be done entirely through a RESTful API. The web is currently trending such that all data will be exposed through an API, because the browser is no longer the only client, now we have mobile devices, tablets and electronic fridges etc.
Website speed is the demand of the day. Running a website with full server dependencies, is not cost effective in terms of speed. If for each and everything we depend upon server and every request is served with a page refresh, then it will be annoying to any user. If you use MVC client architecture like Backbone.js, then most of the load on server is reduced and the website is depends on server only for getting json data and not for the logic of how to display it.
Better user experience is needed for every website that wants more and more users to visit it. And Backbone.js provides a very good user experience, as the demand of the users are served only in the client machine. User does not need a page refresh for any action.

Advantages of Backbone.js

Streamlined Event handling
When a project grows, the jQuery declarations and callbacks gets more complex. The code becomes more cluttered. Backbone.js overcome this problem by providing an event-driven communication between views and models. The backbone.js events build on top of regular DOM events, which makes the mechanism very versatile and extensible.
Syncing with a back-end
The models in Backbone.js can be easily tied to a back-end. The framework provides excellent support for RESTful APIs in that models can be mapped to RESTful endpoints.
Maintainability by following conventions
Conventions are a great way to introduce a common coding style without the need of coming up with an extensive set of coding standards. Backbone.js is particularly helpful to maintain a clean code base despite having multiple developer involved in the coding.
Organized Code
Backbone.js is a client-side MVC architecture. It is a design pattern where we separate the data from the way it is defined, manipulated and displayed. It allows you to structure your Javascript code in an MVC pattern.
Speed
In the MVC platform, web application depends upon server for getting json data for the logic on how to display it. Here load on server is reduced and it helps in increasing the speed of the website.
Reduced data transfer
Normally when client searches a record from the database, it sends a request to server.And then, to render output, database starts processing and send response.
Server -> database processing-> rendering output-> Response
But with Backbone.js request will be sent only for data and data will be returned from server in json format. Those data is manipulated at client-side.

In essence the backbone is the way to structure your application better. You can easily organize client side ‘JavaScript’ code into MVC pattern of Rails applications. Check out implementation of ‘Backone.js’ into Rails applications.

We have implemented numerous Rails applications with backbone.js. Two out of them are KurrentJobs and OrangeGigs.

Please share your experience of implementation of Backbone.js in Rails.