# Looking for a somewhat old quote

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/looking-for-a-somewhat-old-quote/152259>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [October 31, 2008, 11:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/looking-for-a-somewhat-old-quote/152259 "2008-10-31T23:02:14Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![fxn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/77aa72/32.png) [@fxn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/fxn)\
**Post date:** [October 31, 2008, 11:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/looking-for-a-somewhat-old-quote/152259/1 "2008-10-31T23:02:14Z")

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In the early Rails days a few renowed people rewrote a Java webapp in  
Rails, and they did it in a fraction of the time and with less lines  
of code than lines of XML config files. That was about four years ago  
or something like that.

I can’t find a quote for that, web page, book prologue… anyone?

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**Author:** ![fxn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/77aa72/32.png) [@fxn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/fxn)\
**Post date:** [November 1, 2008, 12:11am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/looking-for-a-somewhat-old-quote/152259/2 "2008-11-01T00:11:53Z")

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On Oct 31, 10:01 pm, “Xavier N.” [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> In the early Rails days a few renowed people rewrote a Java webapp in  
> Rails, and they did it in a fraction of the time and with less lines  
> of code than lines of XML config files. That was about four years ago  
> or something like that.
> 
> I can’t find a quote for that, web page, book prologue… anyone?

I’m pretty sure that came from Bruce Tate’s “From Java To  
Ruby” ([Pragmatic Bookshelf: By Developers, For Developers](http://www.pragprog.com/titles/fr_j2r/from-java-to-ruby)). I  
think there’s a copy hanging around at work, I can probably look it up  
on monday if you haven’t found it then.

Fred

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**Author:** ![fxn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/77aa72/32.png) [@fxn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/fxn)\
**Post date:** [November 1, 2008, 1:03am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/looking-for-a-somewhat-old-quote/152259/3 "2008-11-01T01:03:21Z")

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On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 12:10 AM, Frederick C.  
[removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> think there’s a copy hanging around at work, I can probably look it up  
> on monday if you haven’t found it then.

Right :-).

I have the book and have scanned it. It is explained in the section “A  
Case Study” starting on page 38.

Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland (Java experts, authors, etc.) write a  
Java webapp in 4 months that took even longer in .NET. They use  
Spring/Hibernate/WebWork. Then Justin rewrites it in Rails in 4  
nights. The application runs even faster. In the book I see no comment  
about LOCs, but following those hints I could finally get to the  
original post by Justin

[Some Numbers at Last](http://blog.thinkrelevance.com/2005/4/4/some-numbers-at-last)

that has some metrics.

Thank you very much Fred!