Sunday, October 12, 2008

Tale of Two Technologies

My church needs software to replace time-consuming paper-based process. I volunteered to do it. My thought was I'd do it in .NET 3.5 both to learn the technology, try to follow best practices, and get something for the resume in the process. According to my source control logs, I started on Sept. 8th.

This past Monday (Oct. 6th), I realized I had spent around a month on what should have been a fairly simple three-table CRUD+workflow app, and still wasn't done yet. So I decided to revisit Ruby on Rails, just to see how much I could get done, and how quickly.

After spending Monday and Tuesday reviewing Rails, I started a Rails version of the church software on Wednesday (Oct. 8th). Four days later, I've already passed where I was in .NET.

Now, it's true that I haven't written ANY unit tests yet (I'll probably write my first tests tonight). EVERYTHING in the .NET project is unit-tested. But still. Here's a list of the feature comparison between the two projects:









Feature.NETRoR
LoginXX
CRUD for peopleXX
CRUD for events-X
Enforcement of permissions dependency rulesX-
Enforcement of security on PeopleModelUI
Enforcement of security on Events-Working on UI
Global search bar for searching membership-X

I enjoy writing in .NET, but my productivity in Rails the last week has my jaw on the floor.