Posted by Curt Hibbs
Wed, 21 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Last February when Jesse James Garrett
first wrote
about the new term he had coined, AJAX, I was
one of the first
people to run up and down the hallways shouting, “Yes! Yes!” because I immediately recognized the value of attaching this new moniker to some previously obscure (but increasingly important) techniques.
I don’t know if
Productivity Arbitrage
has that same resonant ring to it that AJAX had, but I think Obie Fernandez has certainly crystalized the concept very well. If you want to know why you should start using Ruby Rails now (especially if you are a consultant), then this is a must-read.
Want a realistic example of what I’m describing? Two well-respected consultancies find themselves competing head-to-head for a project: a fairly typical internal web application, of the type that large corporate clients often request. Both consultancies follow Agile practices. Timely delivery for this project is critical (as usual), but delivering on-time is particularly important in this case. The client will get hit with severe regulatory penalties if the new system is not implemented within a year’s time.
The decision makers at Consultancy A propose a Java-based solution at a price of a million dollars, and they estimate final delivery within 10 months. Their bid is competitively-priced and they feel confident about it. They plan to allocate an experienced team using a mature platform (Java). They calculate, using rough figures, that 6 resources x $97 blended hourly rate x 10 months equals about $1MM, a gross margin of about 25%. A higher margin would be better, but all-in-all this deal is not too shabby.
The folks at Consultancy B also have extensive experience building the kind of webapp needed and they see a potential productivity arbitrage play. Instead of Java, they differentiate themselves by pitching a Ruby on Rails solution. Quite innocently, they undercut their competition by pricing their bid at $800K and promising delivery within 6 months. According to their calculations, (and once again, these are rough figures), 4 resources x $192 rate x 8 months equals about $800k. That rate ($192) represents a much higher gross margin, even taking into account that Consultancy B pays its consultants higher salaries.
Can you guess who won? Consultancy B won! At the contract signing, the client CIO says that it was a “no brainer” and lists the following reasons in order of increasing importance…
Please go read
Productivity Arbitrage
now, and be sure to include reading the other posts to which he links. This is about real-world consultancies staking their business on the productivity advantages of Ruby on Rails!
Posted in rails | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Wed, 21 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Yesterday, I commented on
a blog post by Microsoft’s Robert Scoble who asked why developers are
leaving .NET for Ruby on Rails.
As I said then, the post itself was short, but there were many comments posted, and a lot of those posts directly answered his question.
I many more comments have been posted since then, and as I was reading through them, this one caught my eye (excerpted from comment #65):
I now develop everything in RoR.
I managed a development of an internet portal system for a University. I was employed for three years (until the end of this month!) and had a project budget of £1.2 million. We built in .NET and based most of the framework on Microsoft Content Management Server. It took 4 developers, 2 SQL boxes, several hundred thousand lines of code and many, many hundreds of thousands of pounds to get something that was so-so together.
I reimplemented the whole thing in RoR in about a week, on my own, and it was a quicker system when it was finished. I was able to develop on my feeble little iBook, deploy onto a FreeBSD server and plug it into MySQL. The finished product looked identical to the MS solution but was cheaper, quicker and more fun to develop.
This is a telling and compelling story!
Even taking into account the fact that this was a reimplementation, so the design was already known, it is still very impressive that this system could be reimplemented in a week.
Posted in rails | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Ryan Ripley writes
about what it takes to be a success in the marketplace (we all know the technical excellence, alone, is not enough), and why Ruby on Rails had all of the required pieces. Its a good read!
At the end, he concludes:
So there you have it: strong story, timing, going viral, and being authentic. I truly believe that if you are missing just one of these factors, having the greatest framework or in general any product, will not help you.
(via Obie)
Posted in rails | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Microsoft’s Robert Scoble wants to know why developers are
leaving .NET for Ruby on Rails.
The post itself is short, but there are a lot of comments posted.
Fortunately, many of those commenters directly addressed the question of why they dropped .NET for Rails, and it was very informative to wade through the noise to find real answers to this question. Here are a smattering of quotes:
Succinctly put, the learning curve for RoR is shallow, rather than steep, as it is for .NET.
My computer industry (Software QA Manager (WHQL, WiFi, CCX, etc) job went to India, and I lost my MSDN subscription when I lost my job. So I looked for “free” tools to feed my family – and Dot-Net just didn’t qualify.
RAPID development of the Framework – not a 3-4 year cycle, but 3-4 months.
Since I have the source, I can work around almost anything that is just broken or (more likely) I just don’t understand…
The code rails generates looks better than most of the code I write. A lot of people have been burned by the past code generation facilities of the VS products, particularly in the web tier.
Ruby is simple. Rails is simple. ASP.NET 2.0 needs VS. [i.e., needs the VS IDE]
...but they [MS technologies] are so complicated that companies get bogged down in the install process, not to mention deployment and security… I just got fed up. Rails offers me a simple framework that is thoughtfully designed and compels me to write well-structured code. And I can do so much more with less work.
As someone who has built a career off of using MS tools to deliver solutions to customers I can tell you what’s made me look at Rails and what’s making me use Rails instead of ASP.NET for my little home applications. Rails is FAR easier than ASP.NET. (note the period)
Rails makes the simple things even easier, but the complicated things harder. ASP.NET makes the simple things harder than they need to be, and the complicated things possible.
In the last 6 month I have not done a personal project using .Net or C#. Ruby is much more fun and allows me to express much better, and way faster, my ideas into code.
The biggest thing that turns me away from MS web technolgies is the company’s constant insistence to not support web standards. Ever tried to get a large ASP.Net app to validate as compliant XHTML and work consistently in more than just IE? It’s rather difficult.
Succinctly put, with Microsoft, every two years I basically have to relearn the platform. Knowledge half-life is very short. And thus less valuable.
Java more or less sucked all the oxygen out of the room for almost a decade, from an architectural and a general Computer Science perspective; .NET was a true innovation, and a breath of fresh air that awakened the market to the fact that yes, Virginia, there are Other Ways of doing things than “pure java” and J2EE. The platfom was still important… But it’s so complex, the tools and platform are so expensive, and the learning curve across so many spaces so steep that it’s just not worth the time to pick up.
What’s Microsoft to do? Radical thought: Ruby.NET and RoR integrated into the .NET ecosystem. Why not? Embrace and extend…
(via Riding Rails)
Posted in rails | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
O’Reilly just started a group
blog for Ruby
where you will find a variety of well known people from the Ruby community posting entries about our favorite language—Ruby!
I just made my first post there. I tried to avoid posting anything too complex, so please go enjoy my Hello World post!
Posted in ruby | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Yesterday I commented
on Stuart Halloway’s post
about how Relevance bids Java projects vs. Rails projects. It appears that that post created a flood of questions, and Stuart obliged with a follow up post
today.
Some people took my “worst case” number (10% advantage for Ruby) and extrapolated that Java could catch up. That extrapolation is going in the wrong direction. The reason that my number is 10% and not 50% is difficulties that sometimes arise due to the relative immaturity of the Ruby/Rails stack. For example, say we bid one project at 20% cheaper with Rails. But, that price includes the hidden cost of building a database driver and some specialized XML processing that does not exist for Ruby (and does for Java). On our next similar project, we’ll be able to deliver 30% cost savings over the Java bid, because the plumbing will already exist for both platforms. And remember, these numbers come after paying developers more.
Posted in rails | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Mon, 19 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Andrew Glover has written very nice Ruby language article for IBM’s developerWorks titled
Ruby off the Rails
. Its intended as an introduction to Ruby specifically for Java programmers.
What I particularly liked about this article was the way he compared the Java way to the Ruby way with specific and realistic code. This really illustrates the advantage that Ruby has is some very concrete ways.
Take a look at the Java code for the Definition and Word classes. How long does it take to understand how the code works? Now do the same thing with the Ruby implementation of these same two classes.
Ruby is much more concise than Java. The lower level of “code noise” makes Ruby easier to comprehend at a glance. I know both languages very well, and I can tell you from experience that this makes both writing and reading code much more productive.
If you are a Java programmer who is curious about Ruby, then
this article
is for you.
(via Obie)
Posted in ruby | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Mon, 19 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Bruce Eckel just published an
interesting article about Ruby.
He is mostly negative about Ruby (obviously preferring Python), but he does acknowledge some of Ruby’s and Rails’ significant contributions.
David Heinemeier Hansson did a good job rebutting Bruce’s negativity, so I’m not going to repeat any of that other than to say I agree with David.
But I think this article
is definitely worth reading because it does contains some valuable insights. Just take the Ruby negativity with a grain of salt (unless you agree with him, then just enjoy it).
Here’s a couple of the good things he had to say about Ruby and Rails:
I’m sure we will find that the Rails approach isn’t the ultimate solution; there will be plenty of other problems that we need to solve on the way to making web development easy. But it represents a fundamental restart in the thinking process.
I think this is one of the most important contributions that Rails has made, that it has forced us to rethink!
Clearly Ruby is making important contributions to the programming world. I think we’re seeing the effects sooner in Python than elsewhere, but I suspect it will have an effect on Java as well, eventually, if only in the web-framework aspects.
Posted in ruby, rails | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Mon, 19 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
First off, no one has to tell me that Java is a language and Rails is a framework, I know that.
Stuart Halloway has posted a
blog article
sharing the bottom line of his past 18 months of bidding on projects with both Java and Ruby on Rails.
For projects that hit the Ruby on Rails sweet spot, they bid the Rails solution at 30% to 50% less than the Java solution. Outside of the sweet spot they bid 10% lower for Rails.
I found this particularly interesting:
I actually find the 10% number to be the astonishing part of our experience so far. The 50% number sounds better up front, but basically amounts to the same claim that many other people have already made: Rails is extremely productive doing what it was designed to do. The 10% number suggests a much more compelling argument. “Ruby is more productive than Java, period. Even when Java libraries already exist to solve a problem, and you have to roll-your-own in Ruby, Ruby will come out ahead on sizable projects.” It is this 10% edge that prompted me to write the Enterprise Hammer articles.
Posted in rails | no comments
Rails "Flash" concept ported to JSF
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Fri, 16 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
I’ve always said that there’s no one-big-thing that you can point to and say “That’s why Rails is so successful.” No, it’s an amalgam of many small things.
Well,
Ed Burns
just
ported one of those small things,
the Rails “Flash”, to a JSF extension! I think we’ll be seeing more of this in the future.
Posted in rails | no comments
