Play vs Rails

Overview

Rails

Stacks20.2K

Followers13.8K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars57.8K

Forks22.0K

Play

Stacks752

Followers609

Votes496

GitHub Stars12.6K

Forks4.1K

Play vs Rails: What are the differences?

Introduction

When comparing Play and Rails, both are popular web application frameworks used for building web applications. However, they have key differences that make them stand out from each other.

Architecture: Play uses a non-blocking architecture based on Akka actors and guarantees excellent performance, especially for handling concurrent tasks. On the other hand, Rails follows a traditional MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, making it easier for developers familiar with this pattern to work on Rails applications.
Language Support: Play is predominantly written in Scala, which is a statically-typed language, but it also supports Java and other JVM languages. Rails, on the other hand, is written in Ruby and is heavily focused on convention over configuration, making it easy to get started for developers with experience in Ruby.
Real-time Web Applications: Play is well-suited for building real-time web applications due to its reactive architecture and built-in support for WebSockets. Rails, while not as inherently reactive, can be augmented with additional libraries to support real-time functionality but may require more configuration.
Community and Ecosystem: Rails has a larger and more mature community compared to Play, providing extensive documentation, plugins, and resources that make development easier. Play, while growing in popularity, may have a smaller community and fewer resources available for developers.
Learning Curve: Play may have a steeper learning curve for developers who are new to functional programming concepts or Scala, whereas Rails' emphasis on convention over configuration can make it more accessible to beginners or Ruby developers transitioning to web development.
Scalability: Play's non-blocking architecture and support for reactive programming make it more scalable and efficient for handling a large number of concurrent users compared to Rails, which may struggle with performance under heavy load without additional optimization.

In Summary, Play and Rails differ in their architecture, language support, suitability for real-time web applications, community size, learning curve, and scalability.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Rails, Play

Shivam

AVP - Business at VAYUZ Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Mar 25, 2020

Needs adviceon

Node.js

Java

Rails

Hi Community! Trust everyone is keeping safe. I am exploring the idea of building a #Neobank (App) with end-to-end banking capabilities. In the process of exploring this space, I have come across multiple Apps (N26, Revolut, Monese, etc) and explored their stacks in detail. The confusion remains to be the Backend Tech to be used?

What would you go with considering all of the languages such as Node.js Java Rails Python are suggested by some person or the other. As a general trend, I have noticed the usage of Node with React on the front or Node with a combination of Kotlin and Swift. Please suggest what would be the right approach!

915k views915k

Comments

Ben

May 19, 2020

Decided

As a small team, we wanted to pick the framework which allowed us to move quickly. There's no option better than Rails. Not having to solve the fundamentals means we can more quickly build our feature set. No other framework can beat ActiveRecord in terms of integration & ease-of use. To top it all of, there's a lot of attention paid to security in the framework, making almost everything safe-by-default.

482k views482k

Comments

Felipe

May 24, 2020

Decided

Since I came from python I had two choices: #django or #flask. It felt like it was a better idea to go for #django considering I was building a blogging platform, this is kind of what #django was made for. On the other hand, #rails seems to be a fantastic framework to get things done. Although I do not regret any of my time spent on developing with #django I want to give @{#rails}|topic:null| a try some day in the future for the sake of curiosity.

438k views438k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Rails	Play
Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.	Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57.8K	GitHub Stars 12.6K
GitHub Forks 22.0K	GitHub Forks 4.1K
Stacks 20.2K	Stacks 752
Followers 13.8K	Followers 609
Votes 5.5K	Votes 496
Pros & Cons
Pros 860 Rapid development 653 Great gems 607 Great community 486 Convention over configuration 418 Mvc Cons 24 Too much "magic" (hidden behavior) 14 Poor raw performance 12 Asset system is too primitive and outdated 6 Heavy use of mixins 6 Bloat in models	Pros 81 Scala 55 Web-friendly architecture 55 Built on akka 50 Stateless 47 High-scalable Cons 3 Evolves fast, keep up with releases 1 Unnecessarily complicated
Integrations
Ruby	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Rails, Play?

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix is a framework for building HTML5 apps, API backends and distributed systems. Written in Elixir, you get beautiful syntax, productive tooling and a fast runtime.

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Play vs Rails: What are the differences?

Introduction

When comparing Play and Rails, both are popular web application frameworks used for building web applications. However, they have key differences that make them stand out from each other.

Architecture: Play uses a non-blocking architecture based on Akka actors and guarantees excellent performance, especially for handling concurrent tasks. On the other hand, Rails follows a traditional MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, making it easier for developers familiar with this pattern to work on Rails applications.
Language Support: Play is predominantly written in Scala, which is a statically-typed language, but it also supports Java and other JVM languages. Rails, on the other hand, is written in Ruby and is heavily focused on convention over configuration, making it easy to get started for developers with experience in Ruby.
Real-time Web Applications: Play is well-suited for building real-time web applications due to its reactive architecture and built-in support for WebSockets. Rails, while not as inherently reactive, can be augmented with additional libraries to support real-time functionality but may require more configuration.
Community and Ecosystem: Rails has a larger and more mature community compared to Play, providing extensive documentation, plugins, and resources that make development easier. Play, while growing in popularity, may have a smaller community and fewer resources available for developers.
Learning Curve: Play may have a steeper learning curve for developers who are new to functional programming concepts or Scala, whereas Rails' emphasis on convention over configuration can make it more accessible to beginners or Ruby developers transitioning to web development.
Scalability: Play's non-blocking architecture and support for reactive programming make it more scalable and efficient for handling a large number of concurrent users compared to Rails, which may struggle with performance under heavy load without additional optimization.

In Summary, Play and Rails differ in their architecture, language support, suitability for real-time web applications, community size, learning curve, and scalability.