According to a recent Evans Data survey, Microsoft’s .NET was rated the best overall framework by software developers, over competing frameworks from Google and others.
In Evans Data’s recently released Users’ Choice Survey on Frameworks, the market research company asked developers to rank 10 different attributes of the frameworks they have used.
Microsoft’s .NET came out on top, but two Google offerings — App Engine and Google Web Toolkit (GWT) — came in just slightly behind Microsoft in overall satisfaction. However, the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework ranked near the bottom in the survey.
“The purpose of a framework is to make development easier by supplying pre-built generic components and infrastructure so ease of use is obviously important. The .NET Framework provides a full development stack, and it also provides the runtime environment for newly developed applications, so users rated it high.” said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, in a statement. “Rails, on the other hand was rated surprisingly low, with its users unhappy in a variety of areas but especially in the area of a support community.”
As part of the survey, developers also were asked to rank various categories according to importance. Ease of use was the highest rated attribute of a framework, followed by performance and extensibility. This survey is the latest release from the Users’ Choice Series in which global developers and IT managers rate the capabilities of various tools and products they use.
Other highlights of the survey include: Ease of Use cited as most important feature in a Web Development Platform or Framework trumping performance and extensibility attributes; Apache Axis, an open source framework for developing Java web applications, received the top ranking, when it came to performance; and object inheritance, the ability to create new objects within an application using objects that have already been defined, ranked the least important feature among developers.