Overview

Rails API

Stacks95

Followers142

Votes16

GitHub Stars5.1K

Forks275

Fastify

Stacks503

Followers523

Votes95

GitHub Stars34.9K

Forks2.5K

Fastify vs Rails API: What are the differences?

### Introduction
Fastify and Rails API are both popular web development frameworks used for building web applications. However, there are key differences between the two that developers should be aware of.

1. **Performance**: Fastify is known for its unmatched performance due to its use of low-level Node.js APIs, whereas Rails API, while efficient, may have slightly higher overhead due to its additional features and abstraction layers.

2. **Flexibility**: Fastify offers more flexibility in terms of customization and allows developers to choose the plugins they need, resulting in a lighter footprint. On the other hand, Rails API comes with a more opinionated approach and includes a set of conventions that developers are encouraged to follow.

3. **Community Support**: Rails API has a larger and more established community, offering extensive documentation and support resources, making it easier for beginners to get started and find solutions to common problems. Fastify, being relatively newer, may have a smaller but growing community.

4. **Learning Curve**: Fastify is designed to be minimalistic and easy to understand, making it a good choice for developers who prefer a streamlined approach. In contrast, Rails API, with its comprehensive set of features and conventions, may have a steeper learning curve for those new to the framework.

5. **Ecosystem**: Rails API comes with a rich ecosystem of plugins, gems, and libraries that can help developers add functionality to their applications quickly. Fastify also has a growing ecosystem, but it may not have the same breadth of resources available in the Rails community.

6. **Scalability**: Fastify is often favored for applications requiring high scalability and low latency, thanks to its performance optimization features. Rails API, while capable of handling large applications, may require additional tuning and optimization for optimal scalability in extremely high-traffic scenarios.

In Summary, Fastify and Rails API differ in terms of performance, flexibility, community support, learning curve, ecosystem, and scalability, catering to different developer preferences and project requirements.

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Detailed Comparison

Rails API	Fastify
Rails::API is a subset of a normal Rails application, created for applications that don't require all functionality that a complete Rails application provides. It is a bit more lightweight, and consequently a bit faster than a normal Rails application. The main example for its usage is in API applications only, where you usually don't need the entire Rails middleware stack nor template generation.	Fastify is a web framework highly focused on speed and low overhead. It is inspired from Hapi and Express and as far as we know, it is one of the fastest web frameworks in town. Use Fastify can increase your throughput up to 100%.
-	100% asynchronous: all the core is implemented with asynchronous code, in this way not even a millisecond is wasted.;Highly performant: as far as we know, Fastify is one of the fastest web frameworks in town, depending on the code complexity we can serve up to 20000 request per second.;Extendible: Fastify is fully extensible via its hooks, plugins and decorators.;Schema based: even if it is not mandatory we recommend to use JSON Schema to validate your routes and serialize your outputs, internally Fastify compiles the schema in an highly performant function.;Logging: logs are extremely important but are costly; we chose the best logger to almost remove this cost, Pino!;Developer friendly: the framework is built to be very expressive and help the developer in his daily use, without sacrificing performance and security.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 5.1K	GitHub Stars 34.9K
GitHub Forks 275	GitHub Forks 2.5K
Stacks 95	Stacks 503
Followers 142	Followers 523
Votes 16	Votes 95
Pros & Cons
Pros 5 Lightweight 5 Great for quick decoupled apps 3 Simply the best 2 Soon to be merged into core Rails 5 1 Logging by default	Pros 21 Performance 13 Easy to use 12 Lightweight 9 Middleware 9 Open source Cons 1 Small community
Integrations
Ruby	Node.js

What are some alternatives to Rails API, Fastify?

ExpressJS

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

Django REST framework

It is a powerful and flexible toolkit that makes it easy to build Web APIs.

Sails.js

Sails is designed to mimic the MVC pattern of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the requirements of modern apps: data-driven APIs with scalable, service-oriented architecture.

Sinatra

Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.

Lumen

Laravel Lumen is a stunningly fast PHP micro-framework for building web applications with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Lumen attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as routing, database abstraction, queueing, and caching.

Slim

Slim is easy to use for both beginners and professionals. Slim favors cleanliness over terseness and common cases over edge cases. Its interface is simple, intuitive, and extensively documented — both online and in the code itself.

Falcon

Falcon is a minimalist WSGI library for building speedy web APIs and app backends. We like to think of Falcon as the Dieter Rams of web frameworks.

hapi

hapi is a simple to use configuration-centric framework with built-in support for input validation, caching, authentication, and other essential facilities for building web applications and services.

TypeORM

It supports both Active Record and Data Mapper patterns, unlike all other JavaScript ORMs currently in existence, which means you can write high quality, loosely coupled, scalable, maintainable applications the most productive way.

FeathersJS

Feathers is a real-time, micro-service web framework for NodeJS that gives you control over your data via RESTful resources, sockets and flexible plug-ins.