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comp.lang.ruby

Support for 10x Productivity Increase with Rails!

Curt Hibbs

3/21/2005 5:13:00 PM

I got a lot of flack for what I wrote in my ONLamp.com article on Rails when
I said you could get a 10x productivity increase using Rails vs. a typical
Java framework. The funny thing is that I thought I was being conservative!

Anyway, I spent some time talking with Bruce Tate this weekend (author of
Better, Faster, Lighter Java; Bitter Java; and Bitter EJBs) and he was able
to confirm that my claim is *not* out of line (he likes to say 5x to 10x
increase). Obviously your mileage will vary depending on circumstances, but
based on the details I got from Bruce, I still think that 10x is a good
ballpark number.

Some of these details have been reported before (DHH even commented on some
of this in his blog), but if you dig a little below the surface I think it
is even more telling, so please forgive me for re-telling the story...

Bruce Tate and his partner Justin Gehtland were engaged by a client to
replace an web app that had originally taken the company a year to develop.
Justin took 4 months to reimplement this web app using Spring and Hibernate.
Bruce characterized Spring/Hibernate as among the most productive frameworks
available in the Java space.

Recently, Justin decided to re-implement with Ruby on Rails. Bruce said that
this took a total of 5 days (Justin's weblog reported 4 days for 80%
completion so, presumably, 5 days is for the whole thing)!

Now this was widely reported, and so far there's nothing new here. But
consider this:

- Justin is a recognized *expert* in Spring and Hibernate.
- Spring/Hibernate are not your typical Java framework
(i.e., not Struts), but are the current best-of-breed.
- Justin was a *novice* with Ruby and Rails and knew
practically nothing about either one.

Despite being an expert in the best-of-breed Java frameworks and a novice in
the Ruby on Rails frameworks, he still managed an 8x improvement in
productivity -- this is very compelling! I can easily see how the
productivity increase would be even higher if compared with a Struts-based
implementation written by a non-expert.

But there is more... the Rails implementation actually ran faster than the
Java implementation! Now this, too, was previously reported. This had
baffled me somewhat, but Bruce thinks he knows why. He thinks its primarily
because Rails has fewer layers to go through than the java stack, and the
fact that the ActiveRecord ORM layer is much less generalized than Hibernate
and can, therefore, be implemented much more efficiently.

Anyway, it feels good to have my 10x claimed confirmed by an industry expert
to stated that he, too, was skeptical... until he had first-hand experience.

Curt

PS
Bruce Tate and David Geary (author of Core Java Server Faces, Core JSTL,
and more) have signed with O'Reilly to write a "Rails Developer Notebook"
(obviously one of O'Reilly's new Developer Notebooks series).
26 Answers

Glenn Parker

3/21/2005 5:48:00 PM

0

Curt Hibbs wrote:
>
> Bruce Tate and his partner Justin Gehtland were engaged by a client to
> replace an web app that had originally taken the company a year to develop.
> Justin took 4 months to reimplement this web app using Spring and Hibernate.
> Bruce characterized Spring/Hibernate as among the most productive frameworks
> available in the Java space.
>
> Recently, Justin decided to re-implement with Ruby on Rails. Bruce said that
> this took a total of 5 days (Justin's weblog reported 4 days for 80%
> completion so, presumably, 5 days is for the whole thing)!

The devil's advocate would ask, how much of that first four months was
devoted to Justin developing his expertise in the application itself?
Once you've mastered an application's logic, you have a distinct
advantage when re-implementing it in another environment.

--
Glenn Parker | glenn.parker-AT-comcast.net | <http://www.tetrafoi...

Lothar Scholz

3/21/2005 5:56:00 PM

0

Hello Glenn,

GP> Curt Hibbs wrote:
>>
>> Bruce Tate and his partner Justin Gehtland were engaged by a client to
>> replace an web app that had originally taken the company a year to develop.
>> Justin took 4 months to reimplement this web app using Spring and Hibernate.
>> Bruce characterized Spring/Hibernate as among the most productive frameworks
>> available in the Java space.
>>
>> Recently, Justin decided to re-implement with Ruby on Rails. Bruce said that
>> this took a total of 5 days (Justin's weblog reported 4 days for 80%
>> completion so, presumably, 5 days is for the whole thing)!

GP> The devil's advocate would ask, how much of that first four months was
GP> devoted to Justin developing his expertise in the application itself?
GP> Once you've mastered an application's logic, you have a distinct
GP> advantage when re-implementing it in another environment.

Correct. And you can implement the first 90% of an application in 10%
of the time you need for a 100% implementation.


--
Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
Lothar Scholz http://www.ru...
CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's

James Britt

3/21/2005 7:23:00 PM

0

Glenn Parker wrote:
> Curt Hibbs wrote:
>
>>
>> Bruce Tate and his partner Justin Gehtland were engaged by a client to
>> replace an web app that had originally taken the company a year to
>> develop.
>> Justin took 4 months to reimplement this web app using Spring and
>> Hibernate.
>> Bruce characterized Spring/Hibernate as among the most productive
>> frameworks
>> available in the Java space.
>>
>> Recently, Justin decided to re-implement with Ruby on Rails. Bruce
>> said that
>> this took a total of 5 days (Justin's weblog reported 4 days for 80%
>> completion so, presumably, 5 days is for the whole thing)!
>
>
> The devil's advocate would ask, how much of that first four months was
> devoted to Justin developing his expertise in the application itself?
> Once you've mastered an application's logic, you have a distinct
> advantage when re-implementing it in another environment.


I agree; I find that Ruby gives me an 11x increase ("Well, it's one
faster, isn't it? It's not ten." ) in productivity over Ruby whenever I
decide to rewrite a Ruby app in Ruby.

A good deal of development time is figuring out where the specs or goals
are wrong or incomplete, and sorting things out. Once I've written
something, in whatever language, porting it over (or simply rewriting
it) almost always goes faster; there's less thinking involved.


I have a problem with assorted claims based on anecdotal testimony,
however expert and/or reliable the person making the claim. They almost
always come off sounding like biased hype, and the lack of any objective
proof allows people to go away believing whatever the want to believe
anyway.

Much better, I think, to make demonstrable assertions about the tool or
language itself, and let others make their own comparisons based on
their own experience.

James Britt

--

http://www.ru...
http://www.r...
http://catapult.rub...
http://orbjson.rub...
http://ooo4r.rub...
http://www.jame...

Eric Hodel

3/21/2005 7:52:00 PM

0

On 21 Mar 2005, at 09:13, Curt Hibbs wrote:

> I got a lot of flack for what I wrote in my ONLamp.com article on
> Rails when
> I said you could get a 10x productivity increase using Rails vs. a
> typical
> Java framework. The funny thing is that I thought I was being
> conservative!
>
> Anyway, I spent some time talking with Bruce Tate this weekend (author
> of
> Better, Faster, Lighter Java; Bitter Java; and Bitter EJBs) and he was
> able
> to confirm that my claim is *not* out of line (he likes to say 5x to
> 10x
> increase). Obviously your mileage will vary depending on
> circumstances, but
> based on the details I got from Bruce, I still think that 10x is a good
> ballpark number.

43 Things was implemented and released by 5 people in under 3 months.
There was only one Ruby expert (me) and I spend half my time playing
sysadmin.

--
Eric Hodel - drbrain@segment7.net - http://se...
FEC2 57F1 D465 EB15 5D6E 7C11 332A 551C 796C 9F04

Glenn Parker

3/21/2005 7:58:00 PM

0

Eric Hodel wrote:
>
> 43 Things was implemented and released by 5 people in under 3 months.
> There was only one Ruby expert (me) and I spend half my time playing
> sysadmin.

If it's not too much trouble, could you see how much time it takes to
re-implement it using Spring/Hibernate? Just curious... :) :) :)

--
Glenn Parker | glenn.parker-AT-comcast.net | <http://www.tetrafoi...

Bob Aman

3/21/2005 8:20:00 PM

0

> > The devil's advocate would ask, how much of that first four months was
> > devoted to Justin developing his expertise in the application itself?
> > Once you've mastered an application's logic, you have a distinct
> > advantage when re-implementing it in another environment.
>
> I agree; I find that Ruby gives me an 11x increase ("Well, it's one
> faster, isn't it? It's not ten." ) in productivity over Ruby whenever I
> decide to rewrite a Ruby app in Ruby.
>
> A good deal of development time is figuring out where the specs or goals
> are wrong or incomplete, and sorting things out. Once I've written
> something, in whatever language, porting it over (or simply rewriting
> it) almost always goes faster; there's less thinking involved.

Ok, but what about when you want to add new features to an existing
ruby app. What if you're trying to beat your competitors to the
punch? If nothing else, I'd pick ruby simply for the ease in hacking
something together quickly. I just picked ruby up recently, and
thanks to the whole 'least surprise' business, I find that even though
I don't really know what I'm doing, I still manage to do things
exactly the right way on the first try the overwhelming majority of
the time. In Java, and many other systems, it takes at least 2-3
rewrites of a feature before I'm really happy that I got the thing
right... and I know I'm not alone in this. Almost no one ever designs
something totally new without making any mistakes. Even Apple is
working on a 5th generation iPod.

I know people don't really like anecdotes, but Ruby gives me a warm
fuzzy feeling and Java simply doesn't. I doubt I'd claim a 10x
improvement in productivity, but I can definitely say there's a
substantial one, and it's big enough that it's hard to measure.

And actually, so far, I don't think I could claim an '11x improvement
writing something in ruby over writing something in ruby'. So far,
rewrites take me almost the same amount of time as the original code
took to write, because the limiting factor, thus far, seems to be my
typing speed.
--
Bob Aman

Curt Hibbs

3/21/2005 8:33:00 PM

0

Bob Aman wrote:
>
> I know people don't really like anecdotes, but Ruby gives me a warm
> fuzzy feeling and Java simply doesn't. I doubt I'd claim a 10x
> improvement in productivity, but I can definitely say there's a
> substantial one, and it's big enough that it's hard to measure.

Just to be clear, the 10x claim is specifically for web app development
using Ruby on Rails vs web app development using mainstream java frameworks.
I make no such claim for general Ruby vs Java development.

Curt

Bill Kelly

3/21/2005 8:40:00 PM

0

From: "Curt Hibbs" <curt@hibbs.com>
>
> I got a lot of flack for what I wrote in my ONLamp.com article on Rails when
> I said you could get a 10x productivity increase using Rails vs. a typical
> Java framework. The funny thing is that I thought I was being conservative!

So... how about some Rails vs. Wee comparisons ??? <grin>

Seriously, though, if anyone has tried both Rails and Wee, any
notes on how the two frameworks compare or contrast would be
much appreciated.

Trying both Rails and Wee is on my TO-DO list but I haven't
gotten to either yet. I'm interested in Wee because of its
use of continuations. I can expect an additional 7.94322773
times increase in productivity from that, right??? :)


Happy Rubying,

Bill

Bob Aman

3/21/2005 9:40:00 PM

0

> Just to be clear, the 10x claim is specifically for web app development
> using Ruby on Rails vs web app development using mainstream java frameworks.
> I make no such claim for general Ruby vs Java development.

Good point. I was refering to Ruby in general, but really Rails
specifically. I have quite a bit of stuff related to rss and web
services that could easily exist independently of Rails, but it was
all written for the purpose of plugging into it. I still feel more
productive whether I'm working on the independent stuff or if I'm
working on things that are clearly within the domain of Rails. Again,
this is all anecdotal. But I think we'll ultimately find that it's
impossible to escape the anecdotal issue.
--
Bob Aman

James Britt

3/21/2005 10:50:00 PM

0

Mr. Britt wrote:
>>
>>A good deal of development time is figuring out where the specs or goals
>>are wrong or incomplete, and sorting things out. Once I've written
>>something, in whatever language, porting it over (or simply rewriting
>>it) almost always goes faster; there's less thinking involved.
>
>
> Ok, but what about when you want to add new features to an existing
> ruby app. What if you're trying to beat your competitors to the
> punch? If nothing else, I'd pick ruby simply for the ease in hacking
> something together quickly.


Oh, I agree, and this one of the selling points I turn to when
encouraging people to use Ruby over, say, Java or PHP. But I try not to
make any claims involving direct comparisons. I see if I can stick to
describing features inherent to Ruby, with examples.

I, too, have found that one can take a guess at how something is
supposed to work and be right most of the time. And I try to convey
this impressive regularity and the relative absence of special cases as
an essential feature of being productive with Ruby, more so than any app
or library.

I'm doomed if I get into a pissing match with an advocate of some other
language, as there always seems to be some feature or tool that I know
nothing about. I've never used Spring or Hibernate or whatever is cool
this week, so I can't tell Java folks that, say, Og/Nitro will be
x-times anything for them.

My affection for Ruby, though, is not based on any particular tool, but
the language itself and the people who support it.

In the end, people preferring to use Java or PHP or Python or whatever
will look at Wee or Nitro or Rails, steal as much as they can, and be
better off, and I wish them well. But it's much harder to copy a
community and a culture.



James