Ruby on Rails, or Rails, is a server-side framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages. It encourages and facilitates the use of web standards such as JSON or XML for data transfer, and HTML, CSS and JavaScript for display and user interfacing. In addition to MVC, Rails emphasizes the use of other well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration (CoC), don’t repeat yourself (DRY), and the active record pattern.4 Ruby on Rails’ emergence in the 2000s greatly influenced development, through innovative features such as seamless database table creations, migrations, and scaffolding of views to enable rapid application development. Ruby on Rails’ influence on other web frameworks remains apparent today, with many frameworks in other languages borrowing its ideas, including Django in Python, Laravel in PHP, Phoenix in Elixir, and Sails.js in Node.js.

History David Heinemeier Hansson extracted Ruby on Rails from his work on the project management tool Basecamp at the web application company also called Basecamp.5 Hansson first released Rails as open source in July 2004, but did not share commit rights to the project until February 2005.citation needed In August 2006, the framework reached a milestone when Apple announced that it would ship Ruby on Rails with Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard”,6 which was released in October 2007. Rails version 2.3 was released on March 15, 2009, with major new developments in templates, engines, Rack and nested model forms. Templates enable the developer to generate a skeleton application with custom gems and configurations. Engines give developers the ability to reuse application pieces complete with routes, view paths and models.

In this article we'll take an in-depth look at the three most popular static site generators: (a Ruby generator built by Github for powering their Github pages), (an extremly fast static generator built on top of the Go programming language) and (a fast website generator based on Node.js). We'll also look at more specialized options such as (a blazing fast static site/PWA generator built around modern web technologies such as React and GraphQL) and (a CLI and Node.js library for building and hosting books using Git and Markdown). What's Static Website Generation?

Static website generation refers to the process of statically generating a website i.e generate the HTML files, for example, in a local machine and then upload the website files to a server that serves them to users when they are requested. The server doesn't do any server side processing or database communication it only sends the plain HTML files once they are requested. In fact the first website in the world wide web was static (the first web page went live on August 6, 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee) since servers back then were very primitive with no scipritng language such as PHP or databases like MySQL.

Reasons for Choosing the Static Approach? Nowadays there is a plethora of server side languages, database management systems and content management systems so why do many website owners go static? Cd new-site bundle exec jekyll serve Next you can simply navigate with your browser to to see your static website up and running. Once you modify the content Jekyll will re-build your site but doesn't have livereload out of the box, you need to use a Jekyll is easy to install and use, the major problem you'll face at this point is the installation and configuration of Ruby and gem in your system but if you are comfortable working with the Ruby ecosystem the other steps should be easy to follow. Templating System and Themes Jekyll uses the templating engine. Liquid was developed and used by Shopify.

You can also use Textile which is supported through an. Gem-based Themes Jekyll allows you to use themes as gems that can be installed from RubyGems which has many benefits Gem-based themes make it easy for theme developers to make updates available to anyone who has the theme gem. When there’s an update, theme developers push the update to RubyGems. Markdown and Multiple Format Support Jekyll uses the popular ) format with for front matter, CSS and HTML for formatting static content.

Jekyll supports Markdown and HTML by default but you can also support other formats by installing the required converters. Speed A common feature of static site generators is fast time loading as no server side technolgy beats pre-built static files, particularly if delivered by a CDN, in reducing the Time To First Byte. Static generators take the responsability of processing/building pages from the server side/request time to the build time in the developer's local machine. As a result, when it comes to speed static generators are usually compared for how fast they are at build time.

Jekyll is fast as long as you have a small website i.e with small amount of content but when your content grows you are going to experience slow building times so if you are making small updates and iterations the process will turn to be painfull over time. Incremental Build Many static site generators provide incremental build which significantly improves the performance for large sites and reduces the time for building the whole site by incrementaly re-generating only the posts and pages that have been changed. Jekyll supports the incremental build feature but it's only experimental (which may break site generation in some cases) and not enabled by default. You can enable the experimental incremental build feature by adding the -incremental switch to the build command. Assets Handling Jekyll has an assets pipline that supports Sass and SCSS out of the box. It also allow you to customize Sass pre-processing in many ways via some configuration options such as specifying the raw Sass/SCSS folder (defaults to sassdir) and setting the output style supported by Sass. You can also add support for Coffeescript by adding an official plugin.

Download Static Site Generators Web Scripts In Ruby For Mac Download

Content Management Model You can use Jekyll as a Content Management System (CMS) but without the hassle of installing and configuring databases and related tools. Since it's blog-aware it has support for blog-level constructs such as, categories, tags, collections, pages and posts and you can also create custom layouts for you website. Once you generate a website you can start by adding posts in the posts folder. You can also create subfolders inside posts. You can add a page, the basic building of any website by placing an HTML/Markdown file inside the root folder or a sub-folder.

Are recent additions to Jekyll. You can find more information about collections from Collections allow you to define a new type of document that behave like Pages or Posts do normally, but also have their own unique properties and namespace You can work with by placing posts without dates inside the drafts folder then you can use the -drafts switch with jekyll serve or jekyll build to preview your drafts. You can also work with data files with Jekyll. Find more information from the Jekyll supports loading data from YAML, JSON, and CSV files located in the data directory. Note that CSV files must contain a header row. Plugins and Extensibility Jekyll has a powerful with hooks that allow you to create custom generated content for your site. This allows you to run code at different points in your site generation process.

You can find, either official or created by the community, for a variety of tasks so you don't have to re-invent the wheel and you can also create you own plugin if you are familiar with te Ruby language. As a recap, Jekyll is so popular with the largest community so you can find many great tutorials, themes and plugins. It's easy to use, extensible and has a good assets pipeline but one major drawback is the slowness once your content size starts to grow (this perhaps may be solved when the incremental building becomes stable). An introduction to Hugo Hugo is a static site generator built in Go. It's advertised as 'The world’s fastest framework for building websites'. It's recent compared to Jekyll but rapidely growing in popularity. Unlike Jekyll, Hugo is written in Go, a statically compiled language.

This affects in many ways the set of Hugo's features particularly plugins. You can install Hugo in seconds and build an average static website in less than a second. Hugo uses Markdown format with YAML Front Matter.

Pros and cons of Hugo Hugo has many pros:. open source and free project. blazing fast speed, enginnered and optimized for speed. batteries included: built-in pagination, built-in redirection with aliases etc.

Hugo server You can find more information. Speed If you’re concerned about performance and speed, Hugo is the static generator you need. It’s has many built-in features, but most importantly it's blazing fast thanks to Go. Hugo is super fast. You can build your website in terms of milliseconds (instead of seconds or even minutes in case of Jekyll) This benchmark on Youtube shows Hugo building 5000 pages in about 6 seconds Template Engine and Themes Hugo uses by default the Go template package and also supports two Go-based template engines Amber and Ace.

The package template doesn't support layouts only partials. Hugo provides a set of helper methods that make it easy to do custom filtering, sorting and conditionals. You can find free and open source themes in Assets Handling Hugo doesn't have an asset pipeline so you'll have to use an external tool for handling assets that need pre-processing such as ES6, Sass or LESS etc.

If you don't want to work with an external assets pipline you'll have to stick with plain JavaScript and CSS since, during building, Hugo only copies the files from the static folder to the build folder. Markdown and Multiple Format Support Hugo supports Markdown and Emacs Org-Mode out of the box. Ather formats such as Asciidoc can be supported by using external helpers. You can find more information.

Content Management Model Hugo has the most powerful content management system among the other static generators. You can create sections and entries which are Markdown files with Front Matter (with YAML, JSON or TOML) You can easily query content from different sections and dispaly them in templates Hugo also makes it very easy to work with tags and categories.

You can query all post belonging to a tag or a category with simple logic. Hugo also supports data files and dynamically loading data from remote URLs. Plugins and Extensibility Plugins are one of the major weaknesses of Hugo. That's inherited from the fact that Go is a compiled (vs interprited) language so you have no easy and direct way to use a plugin with Hugo. As long as you only need the built-in features (which are many) of Hugo you are fine but if your website needs custom behavior that's not provided by a built-in feature you'll face a problem. Hugo provides external helpers which are close to extensions but unfortunately they don't have access to the template engine or content management internals.

As a recap, Hugo is blazing fast, easy to install even for people with no strong tech background, has plenty of built-in features for most use cases but doesn't have an asset pipline and no support for real extensions. An Introduction to Hexo is Node based, open source static generator available under the MIT license. Thanks to the Node.js platform Hexo allows you to generate hundreds of static files in a matter of seconds. Pros and cons of Hexo Hexo has many pros:.

blazing fast and incredible speed. deploy to Github pages or any other host with one deploy command. powerful Markdown support. highly extensible. available free and open source. available free For the cons:.

Hexo has a relatively large community but the majority is non-english speakers (from China) Community and Popularity Hexo community is getting bigger with Hexo becoming more popular. It's now among the most popular static generators in the web. The main drawback regarding Hexo community is that most of it comes from China.

There are less tutorials for Hexo compared to Jekyll but the is clear and easy to follow. As the time of this writing Hexo has 20.336 stars in Github. Workflow and Easiness of Use If you are comfortable with installing Node.js and managing npm packages you'll have no problem installing Hexo it's only one command away. Most of the time, most headache comes from installing the Node.js platform and npm on your local machine. Once you have a development machine ready with Node and npm installed you can install Hexo from npm by running one simple command.

Hexo init mywebsite cd mywebsite npm install hexo server Speed Hexo is based on Node.js, a platform known by its effiecency and performance, as a result it's very fast (Hundreds of files take only seconds to build) but not faster than Hugo. Assets Handling Just like Hugo, Hexo doesn't have an asset pipeline out of the box for pre-processing assets (ES6,Sass etc.) but since it's a Node utility you can easily integrate it with Gulp or Grunt as a part of a build workflow for using an extrenal tool to pre-compile assets.

You can also use many available plugins which seamlessly add assets pre-processing to Hexo. Check for example. Hexo allows you to have asset folders per post which have the same name as the post file. The content of the asset folder will be copied to the same folder where the post HTML file is located. You can have asset folders per posts by adding a simple configuration setting postassetfolder: true Hexo also allows you to have global assets folders inside the source folder. You can use different tags for easily referencing assets inside different asset folders such as asset path, assetimg and assetlink. Templates Engine and Themes Hexo uses Embedded JavaScript templates (EJS) a simple that lets you generate HTML markup with plain JavaScript.

It has support for layouts, partials and local variables. Hexo introduced Fragment Caching, a feature inspired from. It allows content to be saved and cached as fragments which speeds up the file generation process. You can build a Hexo theme very easily, you just need to create a new folder with a. To start using your theme, modify the theme setting in your site’s config.yml.

Or you can also use open source and free created by the community. Markdown and Multiple Format Support Hexo supports all the features of GitHub Flavored Markdown.

You can also add support for other formats (Textile, reStructedText etc.) by using plugins such as or Content Management Model Hexo has a content management system focused on blogging with support for. You can and drafts as Markdown files with Front Matter for meta data. Hexo supports which load YAML or JSON files from source/data in your posts. Plugins and Extensibility Hexo is highly extensible with a plethora of and has support for all Octopress plugins and many Jekyll plugins.

As a recap, Hexo is easy to install and use, very fast, highly extensible. It has no built in pre-processing for Sass, ES6 etc. But it can be easily integrated as a part of Gulp or Grunt to use external assets pre-processing tools. Hexo is a good option for maintaining a blog. Other Specialized Alternatives: Gatsby and Gitbook Gatsby is a modern and blazing-fast static site generator based on React and GraphQL (for pulling data from different sources like headless CMS systems, SaaS services, APIs, databases or the file system etc.) Gatsby is also a Progressive Web App generator so your static website is a PWA out of the box.

You'll have many best practicies of modern web development that make your app the fatest possible such as code splitting, critical CSS and JavaScript and resources prefetching etc. To start using Gatsby you'll need to have a development machine with Node and npm installed then run the following command.

Gatsby build Gatsby has many advantages such as:. cutting-edge technologies. automatic routing based on your directory structure. re-usable components thanks to React. Webpack-based system. extensible by plugins. high and unbeatable speed.

Easy data pulling from sources like CMS systems, APIs, databases, file system and markdown. For working with Gatsby you'll need to be familiar with React since you use React components to create your pages Gitbook Gitbook is a static generator tool for creating books and documentations. It's both a and a set of Node tools for easily building books with Git. You'll need a Node environment then you can install the Gitbook CLI using npm. Gitbook serve Gitbook has numerous advantages such as:.

create books with powerful tools (content written in Markdown). can generate ebooks in multiple formats: PDF, EPUB, etc.

books are managed by Git. you can distribute your books via a. it supports plugins and has for different purposes Conclusion Choosing the right static website generator is an important step if you want to have a good and enjoyable experience managing your website particularly if you are periodically adding or updating content like the case for a blogging platform for example.

Each one of the static generators we mentioned in this article has their strengths and weaknesses so depending on your needs you can choose the right one for generating your website. Tough if you are just starting with static site generators, Jekyll may be the best option for you since it has a big community and as a result more tutorials. Good and enjoyable experience managing your website particularly if you are periodically adding or updating content like the case for a blogging platform for example. Each one of the static generators we mentioned in this article has their strengths and weaknesses so depending on your needs you can choose the right one for generating your website. Tough if you are just starting with static site generators, Jekyll may be the best option for you since it has a big community and as a result more tutorials.