Awesome Ruby Frameworks For Web Development

Nill Webdev
4 min readJun 15, 2021
Exceed team

Ruby is a programming language that has been accepted with open arms since 1995, and thanks to its open-source nature, it is still growing every day. Ruby is fast, object-oriented, and secure, which brings a dynamic nature into the project with an MVC support structure that makes development more comfortable than ever. With start-ups openly accepting Ruby, the language has shown remarkable progress in almost every field, especially web development. Ruby’s popularity motivated people to take the development to the next level and bring out some best ruby frameworks for the developers.

Some frameworks are built to ease out middleware and request/response of the application. Some are made for REST APIs and others for web applications. Collecting the best ruby frameworks from across the globe, in this post, we’ll talk about these frameworks and how each framework lets the developer take advantage of Ruby.

Without further ado, let’s delve into details of the best ruby frameworks for web development that will surely benefit your business.

  1. Ruby on Rails is regarded as one of the best ruby frameworks. It was the primary language in developing big projects such as Twitter and helped the language boost the community. Often referred to as “Rails,” Ruby on Rails is a web development framework with an MVC control structure and currently running its 6.1 version. The 16-year-old language has dramatically influenced the web development structures and managing databases, web pages, and other components on a web application. Ruby on Rails has an extensive plugin library called “gems” and can be distributed and installed through the popular Ruby package manager called RubyGems. The most notable Ruby on Rails projects include Twitter, Airbnb, and Bloomberg.
  2. Camping is another best ruby web framework. The source code of the camping framework is just 4KB in size, making it the most lightweight Ruby framework on the internet (with equal capabilities). Apart from its size, camping has also been popular since it was written by an unidentified programmer who disappeared in August 2009. Identified by the pseudo-name “Why the lucky stiff,” the programmer has left the project, and since then, camping has been an open-source framework with a huge community. Camping requires Rack to work on the projects and is available as a RubyGem on GitHub. An excellent powerful feature of camping is converting the complete web application into a single file organizing it as an MVC structure. You can visit the official GitHub page to learn more about Camping.
  3. Sinatra is the best ruby framework available in the market for web development. Sinatra is a simple and easy-to-use DSL written in Ruby and often used popularly in place of Ruby on Rails as a web development framework. Sinatra is named after the legendary musician Frank Sinatra and is powerful enough to set up a fully functional web application with just a single file. Sinatra was launched in 2007, is open-source, and hence free to use for the Ruby enthusiasts. Built on Rack, Sinatra can develop micro web applications to full-scale heavy web applications with fewer resources than rails. You would sometimes hear that Sinatra is a microframework, but that is just because of its lightweight and smaller size. In the arena, Sinatra is powerful, capable, and supports RubyGems to accomplish specific tasks with minimum effort. Some notable projects using Sinatra are LinkedIn, Heroku, Apple, and BBC.
  4. Ramaze is another best ruby web framework in competition to help create outstanding web development projects. Being light-weight, Ramaze is faster and offers a flat learning curve. For ruby projects involving JQuery, AJAX, ORM, Javascript, or some templating engine, Ramaze stands as an excellent choice to be seen in the consideration. Ramaze is robust and popular as a “bug-free” framework. Ramaze provides clean and light solutions as compared to Rails. The GitHub page for Ramaze can be accessed through the Ramaze Github link.
  5. Scorched is another one of the best ruby web frameworks that requires Ruby 2.0 and above to work. Scorched is light-weight, and the official website states Scorched as “true evolutionary enhancement of Sinatra, with more power, focus, and less clutter.” Scorched developers have assumed that since Scorched is on top of Rack, the fellow developers are already familiar with it. With that effect, they have removed any “overlapping” functionality and kept Scorched simplified and concrete in its working. Scorched is not recommended to new Ruby developers or inexperienced programmers. Scorched lets you experiment, implement new tools and play around with this open-ended framework. It provides a definite and robust structure for working with HTTP requests and can also be used for scalable ruby-based applications.

If you have experience in some other best ruby frameworks and are excited to have it in this list, mention your framework with its capabilities in the comment section below. I hope this list justified the ruby programmers and the people ready to dive into the Ruby pool. Thanks for reading!

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Nill Webdev

Full-stack developer, sharing cheatsheets, articles, and premium courses to help you get ahead