My little Rails project at work is starting to wind down finally. I’ve been heads-down on this thing for almost a week, but it seems to be worth it–I have a nice UI around my database, along with a clean schema to replace the hacked-up one from the previous design. I have 8 models, 9 controllers, and 40-some views. Including tests and documentation, I currently have 90 files open in xemacs, a personal record.

Of the 4 days I’ve spent on this, at least one full day was lost to bugs in Rails that I had to find workarounds for. Probably another day was spent searching for examples and documentation on specific Rails features and generally learning how the system fits together. The remaining two days were divided between database/code design (there are some weird controller issues for this application) and HTML design. It’s been years since I last threw together anything more complex then a Movable Type theme, so my web-design skills were years out of date.

All things considered, 4 days doesn’t strike me as amazingly fast for this project, but I doubt that I could have been much faster using any other framework. The big thing that’s impressed me with Rails is the amount of polish that I’ve been able to put into this in a very small amount of time–things like pagination and live searching were nearly trivial to implement. With a bit of practice, I suspect that I could churn out similarly-complex applications in a little over a day, and that would be just astounding.