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A Web App Autopsy

particletree.com — Particle tree looks under the hood of the popular web apps Wufoo, Blinksale, FeedBurner and RegOnline. What programming languages did they use? How long did it take them to launch? How many lines of code do they have? What were their conversions like? A must read for anyone looking at creating a start up.

Who dugg this? Made popular Jun 27, 2007

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  • mujib, on 10/11/2007, -0/+28Biopsy.
  • jkane001, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7josh, I agree with you that people over-do the complaints about stupid grammatical errors and such, but using the word "autopsy" in this case connotes a pretty specific meaning. Like indorock, I assumed that this was an article that went into where sites went wrong, and why they went belly-up. Complaining about a person's use of "their" when they meant "they're" is one thing, but this is a pretty drastic mis-use of a word...
  • indorock, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6Precisely that. When i read the title i assumed it was about apps that went belly up. Wufoo et. al. wouldn't appreciate that kind of libel.
  • BlackToothX, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5Would have been more informative if it compared identical business lines that used either Java, PHP, .NET, etc as a means to achieve the same ends.
    Its like comparing Microsoft to a local Dairy Queen... of course they are gonna have different amounts of workers/codelines etc... they are two completely diff businesses!
  • bram, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5I think the article was a little biased against .NET (as is everyone on digg). .NET was not even around in 1996 when RegOnline live. You also have to consider the author is one of the creators of WuFoo, so I'm sure it was biased against anything that they were not using...
  • NerdyNinja, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Didn't seem particularly useful to me, really all it said was be realistic about your goals and to be sure to implement a billing system ahead of time. Surprise, the newest company has a lot of code in JS, I wonder why that might be? Roger that.
  • melonhedd, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Popular? No one has ever even heard of these sites.
  • Anteros, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Conversion rate seems pretty meaningless unless you know how they are getting the traffic and how much it is costing them. If they are getting a lot of free traffic then 1% could be ok.
  • whrde, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Comparative case studies are wonderful things. It's as close to a controlled experiment as you can get, except the task isn't fixed and it's no where near as expensive to run. There is very little actual empirical research into comparing web development platforms, which is a shame. We ran a controlled experiment to compare different web development platforms (http://www.plat-forms.org/), and we're currently running a survey to collect opinions from people with experience in more than one language (http://www.plat-forms.org/survey/).

    More effort (and money) should be put into these sorts of studies, because we need more information.
  • PonyGumbo, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Regonline must have been rewritten, because .NET didn't exist when the company was founded.
  • daok, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Ads.... it's written in the article...
  • flyswat, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Let me guess that the Java and .NET applications are the only ones using a strong 3-tiered approach.

    They are also the most feature complete ones, probably because their true OO nature scales well. This is a truly apples to oranges comparison.
  • Nagash, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Great article.
    I read before that a lot of web Apps have a 1% conversion ratio. I always wonder how they make money.
  • mercprog, on 10/11/2007, -2/+3I'd like to see a more up to date .Net and Java apps. Even with feedburner coming up on 4 years. That is a lifetime in development. I guess I am not as impressed by the age of the company as I am with the age of the app. Was RegOnline ever re-written?

    - Dave B
    Mercenaryprogrammer.com
  • bram, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1They did not say haw many pages there were. Besides that .NET auto generates most code and it is compiled, so it is hard to compare lines of code against a scripting language.
  • mrbananagrabber, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2@Doobious
    From Dictionary.com:

    autopsy 1. inspection and dissection of a body after death, as for determination of the cause of death.

    Did you just skip over the first definition because it didn't support your argument? Also, the definition you used for biopsy does make much more sense in this case.
  • dude187, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Are you just ignoring the second definition because it doesn't support your argument? Words can have more than one use you know...
  • TheSak, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Volume.
  • thinman1189, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2Nicely done.
  • Nagash, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2Great article,

    1% conversion ratio. Thats low. How do they keep up with all the expenses????
  • imatard, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Very ***** cool. We need to see more of this sort of stuff. My manager may actually listen to me when i say that just because you can do it in MS ASP.net doesn't mean you should.
  • CircleFusion, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1It's just comparing numbers. How can that be biased?

    Even his comments about the "time to launch" defends RegOnline's slow startup time.
  • tikistyle, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1Ba-bopsie
  • resplence, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1"All participants agreed that language had little to do with time to launch."

    But Blinksale is built on Ruby on Rails, and I thought RoR was the most glorious rainbow ever! I mean, RoR developers sure can't shut the ***** up about how fast to deliver it is.
  • whrde, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0actually, that doesn't read well: I was referring to a controlled experiment which didn't try to isolate any single aspects of the process. Of course, they are two completely different things.
  • joshlrogers, on 10/11/2007, -5/+4I so appreciate the large number of users here on Digg that feel the insatiable need to correct the most minor grammatical and vernacular error. If you get the drift of what they are trying to say just leave it alone.

    /steps off soapbox
  • rss2pdf, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1Look at the ballast you get when you develop in .NET: 395,501 lines of code !
  • Doobious, on 10/11/2007, -2/+0Ha! I have one more digg than you! x-P~~
  • Doobious, on 10/11/2007, -5/+2Via Dictionary.com:

    au-to-psy
    2. an analysis of something after it has been done or made.

    ...whereas a biopsy is the removal of _tissue_ from a _living thing_, or the tissue itself. So how exactly is "biopsy" a more appropriate word? Y'all worry me.
  • veza, on 10/11/2007, -6/+1good find

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