It's because Rails is essentially a "batteries included" full stack framework which helps a startup focus on building a business and not on building technology infrastructure. Outside of Rails and Django, you're left to make a lot of decisions to get the same level of functionality before you can start building even an MVP.<p>Here's what you get out of the box with Rails:<p>1) Database schema management via Rails migrations which work great with mature RBMSs like Postgres and MySQL.<p>2) A solid ORM (ActiveRecord) which makes CRUD super easy and intuitive.<p>3) An active community with lots of open source libraries (gem) to do just about anything you want.<p>4) Highly productive ways to work with frontend (CoffeeScript) and backend (routing, controllers, active_record, etc).<p>5) Great documentation and ecosystem around it.<p>Contrast this with Go, Node, and other OSS ecosystems and you're often left to make a lot of the decisions on your own with immature libraries. Often to get to the same place, you'll be inventing a lot of your own infrastructure.<p>Node is probably the closest to approaching a "batteries included" status with the MEAN stack, but it's not quite there yet.<p>You can certainly get all of what Rails comes with out of the box on any stack, but unless you know it really well, there's a lot of decisions to be made. With a startup, the kind of analysis paralysis that often comes with technology decisions can really kill an idea in its early stages.
Bias: I'm mostly a Ruby dev, compile OpenSSL and Ruby from source.<p>For greenfield apps, node has the advantage of being mostly the same language back- (node) and front-end (browser). Hence why Asana and others use it.<p>Python is more popular than Ruby, but they're roughly equivalent sans religious wars.<p>The other thing is that Rails is a mature, well-defined architecture with tons and tons of gems.<p>The bower asset packages can be used straight via<p><pre><code> # Gemfile
source 'https://rails-assets.org'
</code></pre>
It's also not hard to get gulp and phantomjs setup.<p>General advice though...<p>Build outside-in. (Frontend first, backend later)<p>Building inside-out can lead to wasting time building things that just aren't needed.
Because for startup to survive it needs to take minimal time from paper napkin idea pitch to production deployment. And RoR has all the bells and whistles packaged together.
The quicker the time - the quicker VC's gets return on their investment.<p>Having said that, please note that ruby on rails is one of the slowest performing frameworks:<p><a href="http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7&test=query" rel="nofollow">http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...</a>
To understand Ruby, and why anyone including a startup wants to use it, you need to understand more about its founder, Matz. He is a truly amazing individual.<p>Here's a recent interview with Matz from RubyConf13 (Miami Nov 2013) <a href="http://multifaceted.io/2013/rubyconf-13-a-chat-with-matz/" rel="nofollow">http://multifaceted.io/2013/rubyconf-13-a-chat-with-matz/</a> that may be of interest.<p>It's about making developers happy…
It's quick to get started with (and it's not PHP). It runs on *nix/Mac OS/Windows. Tools like scaffolding let you move on from simple CRUD stuff to business logic.<p>I'm not a rails dev but these seem like desirable properties, especially if you are working with limited resources to get a prototype or mvp going asap.
I think because it's easier to learn and require less code so startup may focus on product instead of code.
This should be true especially if you compare RoR to java technologies, but i'm working on a project where Grails was the requirement and i think Grails has a good future because thank to Groovy it requires a lot less code but has its foundation on java frameworks (hidden to the developer) which are very stable, solid and mature (and obviously complex!)
Well its as heavily used as other technologies I think it would be safe to say. RoR, Django, Synphony are some of the frameworks I am constantly hearing about for start ups. Just depends on the programming language preference.
Your question has already been answered at Quora:<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Ruby-on-Rails-web-framework/Why-do-so-many-startups-use-Ruby-on-Rails" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Ruby-on-Rails-web-framework/Why-do-so-m...</a><p>P.S. You need to sign-in with your Google or Facebook account to view the page.