There are many useful Ruby / Ruby on Rails libraries that let you build real-time web apps easily. These libraries automate many things. So you don’t have to do everything manually in order to build your real-time web app such as a chat application.
Yes, it’s possible to build your real-time web app with just Ruby on Rails, without using any libraries / frameworks, but that would take a huge amount of development time. Why should you reinvent the wheel? With the right library, you can complete your project in a very short time and with great quality. When you’re using a library, you are reusing the high-quality, reliable code written by great developers. So it saves you a lot of time.
Building real-time web apps is not easy because for real-time web apps, performance and scalability are super important, both of these can be achieved with the right libraries / frameworks.
Instead of using any libraries, if you try to build your real-time app from scratch, you will end up spending too much time and your app may not perform well. So using libraries and frameworks is a good decision in this case.
This article talks about top 7 Ruby / Ruby on Rails libraries for building real-time web apps. These libraries increase your productivity and help you build real-time web apps with a minimal effort.
So let’s talk about them now!
Plezi
Plezi is one of the most popular Ruby frameworks for building real-time web applications. As it’s a pleasure to work with Plezi, it has been named “Plezi”. This library gives support for native Websockets. It provides a RESTful router, object-oriented MVC / CRCA design, Websocket connections, Pub / Sub support, automatic scaling, template rendering abstraction engine, and so on.
One of the most impressive things about Plezi is that it’s extremely easy to use. You can run an app in a small script file.
There is a sufficient amount of documentation and tutorials available about this library on its official site. So you can easily learn how to use it. The complete code examples given on their official site make it easy for you to understand and implement Plezi in your real-time web application project.
You can learn more about Plezi from the official site.
Action Cable
Action Cable integrates WebSockets with your Ruby on Rails web application. It’s a JavaScript framework on the client-side and Ruby framework on the server-side, which makes it a full-stack solution. This framework gives your app great performance and scalability.
With Action Cable, you get a subscription adapter interface that processes the pubsub internals. The adapters that are included in Action Cable are inline, asynchronous, Redis, and PostgreSQL adapters. You can also create your own adapters.
You can install Action Cable with RubyGems or npm, and download the source code as part of the Ruby on Rails project hosted on GitHub. It has 39,854 stars on GitHub.
Pakyow
Pakyow is an amazing Ruby web framework for building real-time web apps. With this framework, you don’t have to write any client-side code. Pakyow is a simple tool that greatly increases your productivity.
It allows you to build a prototype for your project in HTML. You can then develop your project based on this prototype. A prototype gives you a clear picture of the final result. It helps you visualize how the actual product should look like.
With this framework, you can build high-quality, interactive user-experiences.
Official website: https://www.pakyow.org/.
On the official site, you will find high-quality documentation, tutorials, guides, and so on. There’s a forum section on the site so that you can discuss your problems with the community members.
Firehose
Firehose is an awesome library that lets you develop real-time web applications. In order to use Firehose, you have to install Redis 2.6 first. Then you need to install the gem. It’s a powerful library. You can find it on GitHub: https://github.com/firehoseio/firehose.
RenderSync
RenderSync is another great library that helps you in building real-time web apps. The minimum requirements for this tool are Ruby 1.9.3, Ruby on Rails 3.1, and jQuery 1.9. This library will also work fine with the later versions of Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and jQuery.
UniMIDI
UniMIDI is a useful Ruby library for real-time MIDI input and output. It works on Linux, Windows, OSX, JRuby, and Cygwin. The requirements for this library are Ruby 1.9.2 or JRuby 1.6.1. It’s better if you have newer versions. UniMIDI uses midi-jruby for JRuby, alsa-rawmidi for Linux, ffi-coremidi for OSX, and midi-winmm for Windows and Cygwin.
Cramp
Cramp is an asynchronous real-time Ruby framework. It has 1,554 stars on GitHub. If you want to work with a great number of open connections, Cramp is a good fit.
You can also take a look at Awesome Ruby. This is a collection of useful Ruby libraries, frameworks, and tools. Contributors from all over the world have developed a huge number of Ruby libraries, frameworks, and tools to make the life of a developer easy. This collection is called Awesome Ruby. Awesome Ruby contains libraries and tools for abstraction, admin interface, analytics, API building, authentication, authorization, automation, caching, captchas, code highlighting, concurrency, configuration, country data, cryptocurrencies, data processing, data visualization, date and time processing, debugging, and so on. You will find a big list of categories of libraries on the official site.
This article gave you a list of top 7 Ruby / Ruby on Rails libraries and frameworks for building real-time web apps. Using these tools, you can achieve your goals quickly. These libraries not just increase your work productivity, they also increase the quality of your products. In other words, by using these libraries in your real-time web app project, you can make your app super fast and scalable in a small amount of time.
I hope you found this article useful. Do you need to develop a web app using Ruby on Rails? We have Rails experts who can build high-quality web apps for you. Give us a call at +60197570530 or send us an email at hello@virtualspirit.me if you need a Ruby on Rails app developed.
