While designing a custom digital advertising solution, you need to be sure your web tools are able to effectively address the critical AdTech development challenges — reducing time-to-market, ensuring solution flexibility, and cutting development costs. Ruby on Rails (RoR), an extremely popular full-stack web framework, has capabilities to answer all of them at once.
From our AdTech experience, RoR helps to optimize the development process, cut expenses, and reduce development time by 30-40%. That’s why so many major web projects are powered with RoR: Shopify, Groupon, Crunchbase, Airbnb, Hulu, Couchsurfing, and Kickstarter.
Check out 6 core features making Ruby on Rails a perfect weapon for rapid AdTech development.
The number one thing Ruby on Rails is head and shoulders above any other frameworks is quick and effective prototyping. The simple and elegant syntax, thousands of open-source templates, and powerful built-in dev tools allow designing a functional AdTech POC or MVP in a matter of days. Moreover, with Ruby on Rails you don’t have to waste time on additional adjustments and file pre-configurations — the framework is always set up and ready to run.
Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) is a core programming principle of Ruby on Rails development. RoR offers you almost 150,000 ready-made web modules that you can integrate into your digital advertising platform in the blink of an eye and almost without any coding. The reusable code helps to slash total projects costs by dramatically reducing bugs and development efforts. Moreover, you can also opt for a popular APIs for app development.
Among thousands of valuable Ruby Gems, you can find almost any AdTech module you intend to implement - from publisher activity notifications and creatives management to real-time reporting and payment platforms integration.
Active Ruby community as of January 2019: total gems, users, and gem downloads. Source: https://rubygems.org/stats
Ruby is one of the most rational web languages. Compared with, say, Go, Rust, or Java, you need much less code and developers’ time to implement even the most complicated business logic in Ruby. Check out a funny yet informative example, perfectly illustrating how Ruby saves so much time and money for the project.
Implementing a difference function: Go vs. Ruby; Source: https://dev.to/aspittel/comment/6lgp
Due to its modular structure, RoR-powered digital advertising solution is able to rapidly adapt its functionality to the client’s requirements or volatile market conditions. Easily change project scope by adding complex functional modules on the fly and without interrupting workflow.
RoR ensures unequalled flexibility of your AdTech system, which makes it a perfect framework for long-term Agile projects with their constantly changing scope and continuous functionality improvement.
Migrating to Ruby on Rails not only helps to reduce development efforts and time but also optimize team structure, which results in a dramatical cut of total project costs. Issues that would normally demand a number of full-time non-Ruby engineers, a single Ruby developer can perform quickly and effectively by leveraging built-in dev stack and RoR gems.
Another way to facilitate digital advertising platform maintenance and cut expenses is through effective test automation. Via handy and highly-productive tools for a comprehensive unit testing, real-time code quality control, and streamlined refactoring, RoR helps to eliminate urgent bug fixing, slash maintenance costs, and release with confidence.
A combination of integrated Minitest module and powerful Rspec framework helps to automate testing of specific AdTech modules like geotargeting, client entities management, integrations with third-party AdTech platforms, RTB monitoring and more.
Designed by a top-notch architect, a RoR application has a tremendous scaling potential. Deploy your server, app and database instances on different servers to enable your application to accurately balance load, eliminate bottlenecks, and scale as much as needed. For instance, Spotify is built on RoR and sustains millions of daily visitors.
As mentioned before, Ruby on Rails has its own constraints concerning out of the box scalability and parallelism issues. But for some development projects it has no equals.
If you need to design your SSP, DSP or ad exchange cost-effectively and within harsh deadlines, seriously consider choosing RoR for the job. Its rational language and an enormous library of ready-made web modules ensure a whirlwind development speed, unparalleled flexibility, and optimized costs of your custom advertising platform.
