Code stats update: EDU 2.0, Moodle, Sakai

About 7 months ago I compared the lines of code in the edu 2.0, Moodle and Sakai code bases. Since then, we've added a large number of new features to edu 2.0 with an emphasis on support for schools, departments, and a slew of improvements across the board.

Because of this, there's been a noticeable increase in adoption and we just passed the 20,000 member mark. About 1,000 new members join every week and we anticipate that this will accelerate.

For fun, I gathered the latest statistics for edu 2.0 and compared them against the old ones:

16,500 -> 22,000 lines of code (+30%)

309 -> 466 classes (+50%) 

1881 -> 2934 methods (+55%)

6 -> 6 methods per class on average (+0%)

6 -> 5 lines of code per method on average (-15%)

Overall, the code base has gone up by around 50%. We've continually refactored the code and it's actually simpler than it was before. Maintaining simplicity (both from the user perspective and the developer perspective) becomes increasingly important as functionality increases. We do a code review at least once a day in order to continually improve the architecture.

One of the things I'm particularly proud of is how small the edu 2.0 code base is relative to Moodle and Sakai. Here's the updated comparison:

Moodle: 1,500,000 lines of PHP, 300 man years

Sakai: 2,000,000 lines Java, 250 man years

EDU 2.0: 22,000 lines of Ruby, 3 man years

The Moodle and Sakai LOC statistics are out of date now, and I suspect that they've both grown larger over the last 6 months.

Comments

[Steve]

I notice the founder of moodle got a little defensive in your previous post about the stats. The lines of code vs capabilities is impressive, but you may be missing the most important stat...that of security. There are a lot of security vulnerabilities in that 1.5 million lines of Moodle code that Martin doesn't want to talk about. See the Moodle Security tag at www.moodleus.org for more information.

Good luck with edu2.0

Cheers,
Steve

[Graham Glass]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your email! It's certainly true that the more lines of code there is to manage, the more opportunities there are for security issues. We extended the Rails framework to add a nice security layer that is simple to use. For example, to prevent anyone except the teacher of a class from performing an action, you can just put the word "teacher" before the methods.

Cheers,
Graham