Build Social Networking Apps with Rails
Building a scalable Rails app with powerful social media features like activity feeds, notifications and profiles is made much easier with our Stream API. Stream API and Rails handles the news feeds and keeps you fully in control over the end user experience.
Aggregated Feeds, Ranked Feeds, feed specific analytics and personalization all help you improve your app's engagement, retention and conversion. You can also use Stream to build personalized feeds into your Rails app. Typical social networks usually require flat timeline based feeds, ability to group feed updates along with simple notifications. Stream also offers deep analytics into the engagement of your feed as a service that you can't find anywhere else.
With years of building and maintaining large scale feeds; we’ve solved some of the hardest problems when it comes to speed and reliability (especially for Rails). We’ve consistently matched (or beat) benchmarks for updates against the leading Rails social media networks online. Your data is backed up in multiple locations around the world, protecting your users and your business.
Working with the Stream API and the Ruby on Rails framework
Ruby on Rails is the number one web application framework for the Ruby language. It was created by David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp (formerly 37 Signals) in 2005. After release, and in parallel with the success of Basecamp, RoR quickly became a first choice for developers and teams building feature rich web applications.
The framework caught on primarily for it’s ease of use and for it’s suitability for teams adopting agile processes like Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. As Wikipedia describes, it “emphasizes the use of well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration (CoC), don't repeat yourself (DRY), and the active record pattern.”
Many of the most popular social sites on the internet are built with Rails. Basecamp (naturally), AirBnB, Github, and Shopify are all great examples. Twitter even started out as an RoR application before being shifted to Scala (hint: we love Scala too).
Thanks to it’s full feature-set and vibrant developer community, Rails is definitely a great choice for building Stream powered applications.
Getting started
Our framework integration for Rails is stream-rails.
Continuous integration is via Travis and we publish packages to Ruby Gems. Contributions in the form of issues, feature suggestions and pull requests are most welcome.
Our low level Ruby API is also available.