Craig Walls is the coauthor of both Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action. Recently, he had “…come to the conclusion that I could not ignore Rails any longer”. This is what he found:

Honestly, I’m quite impressed. I found that the productivity claims surrounding Rails to be quite accurate. After writing only a single line of code, I had a reasonably functional application. Adding a couple of more lines, I had a one-to-many relationship between two model objects. The biggest chunk of work comes in customizing the view, but that’s to be expected because there’s no way that Rails can anticipate your desired look-and-feel. All in all, I spent 15 minutes putting together a simple application that might have taken me several hours with any of the other frameworks that I’m familiar with.

My emphasis. This is the same conclusion that Bruce Tate has been talking about. It actually does rapidly improve your ability to deliver working software. Is the factor 2, 5, or 10 times? Who knows (and cares?). How about we just settle it at it’s enough of an improvement that you ought to try it out for size.