Rapid prototyping of web applications combining Ruby on Rails and Reverse Engineering

Abstract: This study presents the results from a comparison study performed in order to evaluate Ruby on Rails modeling and code generation features against J2EE environment and AndroMDA. For that purpose quality scenarios were built in order to to perform metrics measurements that in the latter stage were used to evaluate the both platforms. The scenarios’ main purposes were to measure development speed, implementation complexity, modeling time, and versioning. Through this process, it was possible to identify key features that pointed Ruby on Rails as the faster development environment. The results showed that a Rails developer could write less code (for implementing the same functionalities) than a J2EE developer. The time spent for modeling the database schema in textual environment was less than then AndroMDA visual environment. The time needed for creating a diagram of the database schema using Ruby on Rails reverse engineering plugins was less compared to J2EE. Finally, Ruby on Rails database version management allows the developer to switch between different database schemes in less and simpler steps than in J2EE or AndroMDA.