Developers rank Microsoft .Net higher than Google frameworks

Evans Data Corp.'s Users' Choice Survey on Frameworks 2010 has Microsoft leading the pack and open source Ruby on Rails trailing behind.

By Microsoft Subnet on Tue, 04/27/10 - 3:18pm.

Software developers rank Microsoft .Net the best overall framework, ahead of competitive offerings from Google and the open source Ruby on Rails.

Google is still no threat to Microsoft

According to Evans Data Corp.'s Users Choice Survey on Frameworks, 425 global software developers were asked to rank 10 attributes of the frameworks they have used. The overall results landed Microsoft .Net on top, with two Google offerings -- App Engine and Web Toolkit (GWT) -- coming in just slightly behind Microsoft in overall satisfaction. The open source darling, Ruby on Rails, placed closer to the bottom, according to Evans Data Corp.

"The purpose of a framework is to make development easier by supplying prebuilt 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."

Other findings in the survey showed which attributes developers most appreciate in a framework. Survey respondents listed ease of use as the most important feature in a Web development platform or framework, ahead of performance and extensibility attributes. The study also revealed that Apache Axis, an open source framework for developing Java Web applications, received the highest ranking in the performance category. And the least important feature for developers is object inheritance, which Evans Data Corp. defined as "the ability to create new objects within an application using objects that have already been defined."

Evans Data Corp. included the following frameworks in the user satisfaction survey:

    * Apache Axis
    * Apache Struts
    * Google App Engine
    * Google Web Toolkit
    * Java Server Faces
    * Microsoft MFC
    * Microsoft .NET
    * Microsoft Win32
    * Oracle ADF
    * Spring
    * Rails
    * Zend

And developers were also asked to rank the following attributes and capabilities:

    * Ease of Use
    * Extensibility
    * Lightweight
    * Performance
    * Flexibility
    * Program Flow
    * Simplicity
    * Object Inheritance
    * Community Support

More information on the survey and its results can be found here.

Posted by Denise Dubie

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