Build a Rails Social Network

Use the Stream Ruby Gem to build social features into your Rails app. Stream for Rails client on Github. Speed up your development.

End Users
API Stack
  • Raft logo
Avg API Response
Compliance

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.

What you can do

  • personalization
  • chronological feeds
  • notification systems
  • aggregated feeds
  • profile feeds
  • ranked feeds
  • analytics

Chat Messaging API

  • Build complete chat experiences
  • Chat APIs, SDKs and UI/UX Kits
  • Unmatched scalability + reliability

Activity Feeds API

  • Build timeline or notification feeds
  • Machine learning personalization
  • Enterprise scalability + reliability

Next Steps

Open your Stream Account to try out all our Activity Feeds product has to offer. No commitment or credit card required. If you want a custom plan or have questions, we are eager to talk with you.

Chat Messaging

Build any kind of chat messaging experience without scalability or reliability issues.

Learn more about $ Chat Messaging

Enterprise

Available 99.999% uptime SLAs and industry-leading security to power the world's largest apps.

Learn more about $ Enterprise