Comparing web development platforms through the eyes of professional developers

Abstract

Objective comparisons of web development platforms are much needed by development teams. The Plat Forms experiment sought to provide these objective comparisons, and this survey was designed to provide the subjective context for the experiment’s results. The survey, run in June 2007 asked 268 web developers to directly compare their two best known platforms for 12 aspects of software quality. The results of this survey ideally show where the objective results of the Plat Forms research agree with the current opinions of web developers, and where they disagree. In addition to the 3 platforms measured in the Plat Forms research (Java, Perl, PHP), Ruby and Python developers were also involved. Many of the survey results agreed with the objective research, for example PHP was less dependent on tools and frameworks. Some results differed from the Plat Forms research, for example, PHP was rated poorly for security and robustness.