With the Hobo project, we're exploring a very simple question: how much can the framework do for you? Can patterns and features, which are common across many web applications be captured and automated without loss of flexibility? It has been said that Rails is "ten times faster than Java," but just how fast can things get? The Hobo plug-in is at an early stage of development, but already the answer seems to be "pretty darn fast!" We have built non-trivial web apps where controller code is almost non-existent, view templates are poetically brief, and Ajax is essentially free.