If you’re a CTO, you will inevitably have a similar exchange with “the suits” in your company.
Evolvist CEO: This guy wrote a Web 2.0 app in 66 hours. Why did ours take longer to build?
Me: Because he designed the thing himself, (admittedly) tossed features he thought were too complicated, didn’t deal with changing requirements until launch, didn’t have tons of complicated environmental data across half a dozen database tables, didn’t have to integrate with Google Maps, didn’t have a legacy codebase early on in the game that needed to be altered with mind-boggling database migrations, did not implement content versioning, and did not include system administration or scaling measures as part of the 66-hour time estimate.
Evolvist CEO: Oh.
Rails, CakePHP and other rapid development frameworks are great, and indeed, it takes an hour or less to get a rudimentary webapp up and running with their help. These frameworks are also awesome because you can focus on the truly challenging aspects of your application rather than, say, debugging code that writes to the database. That said, they are not a magic wand that can create apps of varying complexity developed, tested, launched and scaled in the same short timeframe.