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20080211 Monday February 11, 2008

Web Application Frameworks based on Real-World Popularity I received an interesting (spam?) comment on my What Web Application framework should you use? entry today:

A useful resource to compare Java web frameworks (Spring, Tapestry, Struts, OpenLaszlo,...) and also PHP, Python, Ruby web frameworks:

http://www.therightsoft.com/softwaretechnologies/webframeworks

If you go to the site, you'll see they have a hierarchical list of web application frameworks based on real-word popularity. First of all, I'm unsure of what "real-word" popularity is.

Let's assume this is a typo and it should be "real-world" popularity. Where is the credible source for this data? Where is the link to this credible source? I like the list, its sortability and filterability, but there's no evidence that it's true. Care to elaborate on your sources tom@therightsoft.com? Posted in Java at Feb 11 2008, 03:10:57 PM MST 10 Comments

Comments:

Just starting from the top and going down a few lines I notice that he gives Django 5 out of 5 stars in terms of popularity. Doesn't this automatically invalidate it?

Posted by Bryan on February 11, 2008 at 04:50 PM MST #

Apache struts is only 2 stars ? mythbusted!

Posted by ingramchen on February 11, 2008 at 05:14 PM MST #

Does hierarchical have a different meaning that I don't know about?

Posted by 98.160.123.91 on February 11, 2008 at 06:34 PM MST #

As much as I would like to believe that GWT is more popular than Struts, I am fairly certain that the only definition of real-world popularity that fits that list is: the popularity of a web frameworks according to the cast of MTV's Real World.

Posted by Brent Atkinson on February 11, 2008 at 09:27 PM MST #

Yeah, agree with previous comments. Quite clearly the website is bogus, as are the ratings. No one would incorrectly spell "world" in a legitimate website, and the ratings are utterly silly. Someone created a website to somehow serve their own interests, and if that is not the case, then they need to revisit their concept.

Posted by JavaGuy on February 11, 2008 at 10:50 PM MST #

Um, I think he meant "word", like look on google, digg, or dzone, search for that word and make some sort of relative scale about the number of results found. So basically it would be the loudest frameworks, not the best or most used.

Posted by Mike on February 12, 2008 at 10:50 AM MST #

Don't feed the trolls by clicking the link!

Seriously, though - I wonder how one would structure an empirical study on the use of any given technology? Spidering user forums is the only solution I keep coming back to, and that would be both inaccurate and creepy.

Thoughts?

Posted by Peter Mularien on February 12, 2008 at 03:12 PM MST #

If nothing else, I found it interesting to see this long list. We can see that Java is not the only language with a large number of web frameworks!

Posted by Freddy D. on February 12, 2008 at 03:42 PM MST #

Matt, The "real world popularity" is defined there : http://www.therightsoft.com/about/

Posted by Emmanuel Venisse on February 12, 2008 at 05:01 PM MST #

Thanks Emmanuel. It looks like they corrected the spelling from yesterday (real word -> real world) and added a link to the page you mention. Now if we could only get the source code for their popularity algorithm. I'm not arguing with their results, I'd just like to see how they're derived.

Posted by Matt Raible on February 12, 2008 at 05:22 PM MST #

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