Seriously, how much time does it take to develop a rails pro

Rails
1

hi all,
if you have to develop an app like digg with all its current features,
starting from scratch, how much time would you take, doing it alone?

also if someone wants to create something like cragslist, how much hours
would that take.

note: i dont want at all to make a copycat of digg or craiglists, i just
want to compare how fast i develop comparing to other people, taking
examples of well known websites

thanks everyone

–
Heri R.
http://sprinj.com

2

seriously, can there be a real answer to this? it depends on who is
writing the code, how many are writing the code, how familiar they are
with ruby and rails, how quickly they can learn on their own etc…

what i can tell you is that i have worked 5+ years with classic ASP,
PHP, Java/Servlets, and now python and rails. I like rails the most
and find it to have the shortest development time.

recreating digg or craigslist would be a week or two for me, and i’m
still a rails noob.

3

I think it’s also important to distinguish between creating an app that
copies the features of digg or craiglist, and actually deploying the app
successfully. The features might not take a while, but testing,
deploying, and keeping the site going with a sizeable user base I would
imagine are a huge time sink.

4

to develop from scratch, a week or 2 being a noob(just backend no pretty
interface). afterwards, any other site that is similiar, a day or so.
once you get the hang of controller, model, view and learning to
use/understand user documentation/api things start to get easy. ive been
in the RoR environment for about 2 months now.

5

From my point of view, after all this you get a working “prototype” of
the application. The optimization can take a while (the numbers of
queries to the database, …)
You can have something “overnight”, but the final product much later.

ZON
http://www.ZONator.com

6

rosoft2001 wrote:

You can have something “overnight”, but the final product much later.

I’d agree with this. I could have a non-ajax, non-styled (ie, very
simple UI) Digg-esque prototype in around a day. Two days if I used
continuous integration to test everything as I went (great way to
eliminate problems later).

For a fully polished UI and total stability, I’d reckon on about two
weeks of work.

As for Craigslist, I’ve never really looked at it, so couldn’t tell you
how long that would take.

Rails just makes it all so much easier, I find myself prototyping apps
for clients while they sit there telling me what they want.

Dougal.

7

mixplate wrote:

Maybe I’m just bit crap, but I do tend to think this underestimates the
length of time it takes by quite some way, and is in danger of making us
slowcoaches feel totally useless.

If you’ve got the app clearly thought through, understand the
architecture and UI, and have a good understanding of not just Rails but
Ruby too, and aren’t thoroughly developing test case prior to coding,
then these sort of timescales are possible.

However, there’s probably a day or two – at least, and that assumes no
diversions, checking RSS feeds, other flow-reducing activities etc –
working out how to structure the app if there’s any depth to it (though
it won’t necessarily be all at the beginning).

Add in a good dose of TDD, which will probably take 2-3 times as long as
writing the code itself (quit looking at the browser), and you’re
talking weeks not days.

However, at the end, it will still have been an order of magnitude less
than most other languages, and will probably be far more robust code
with a stronger, more elegant structure (particularly if, like me, you
come from PHP), and will have a good test suite that will make
refactoring a cinch.

Just my $0.02

Chris T