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by Marc Logemann.
Original Post: On Matt Raible's web framework comparision
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I dont know exactly what was more surprising, reading the comparision itself or the fact that something like this makes it into theserverside.com. There must be a reason i only read TSS when i am totally bored. 6 years ago, this was a readable site.
Let me get back to the comparision. First of all, i dont think that someone is able to compare 13 web framework with such detailed categories, because its more than unlikely that he is familiar with all the mentioned web frameworks. And with familiar i mean doing real projects with all of them. I dont count Appfuse as a real project, sorry. I dont say that everything is wrong in there but there are some really bad facts.
I am one of those untalented guys who has used 4 (Struts2, Spring-MVC, JSF and Vaadin) of those mentioned web frameworks in real projects. Lately i am using Vaadin for a project, so i will comment on the Vaadin part.
-> Developer Productivity: 0
Ok. This is really interessting. It gets even more interessting if you look at the GWT section. GWT gets 1. I always thought that the productivity level of those two frameworks should be pretty equal since its the same approach.
-> Developer Availability: 0
What has Matt done to check this? Searching job sites for Vaadin? If yes it could be that there were simply were no jobs but does that mean Vaadin should get 0? Of course not, because every GWT developer can develop with Vaadin without much difference. In fact every Swing or AWT developer should get Vaadin in no time.
-> Templating: 0
What a category is this? Any why gets GWT 0.5 here? First of all, this category is useless. Since Vaadin is not based on classic templating as most JSP frameworks do. One simply cant downgrade the whole framework, because of its different concept. You can of course re-use layouts and stuff, if this is the point of this category.
-> Plugins - Addons: 0
Uhhh? I always thought that Vaadin has a quite healthy plugin repository. Of course its not as big as the eclipse-sphere but you can find some useful things in there. All this can be packaged via Maven rep. I wont give it a 1 but a 0 is weird.
-> i18n: 0.5
You can use basic java i18n in Vaadin. Since i am developing java, i found java's native way of handling i18n good enough. Should be a 1 in my oppinion. Cant see why Struts2 is better ranked.
-> Multi-language Support (Groovy / Scala)
Never seen such a useless category.
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To summarize all this. Some categories make sense and some of them were researched quite good, at least for the frameworks i know. But the overall usefulness of this chart tends to zero. First of all, a web app is not a web app. There are use cases which need a real RIA platform (business apps) and use cases which need fast output but nearly no components (twitter, stackoverflow). Saying that Spring-WebMVC is the best web framework is like saying "Porsche 911 is the best car". Perhaps a 911 is the best car on the highway, but in the rocky mountains, i would prefer a Land Rover. Have you ever tried to programm a RIA app with Spring-WebMVC? I can tell you, this would be the ultimate nightmare pick.
This chart will most likely make it into big companies and then they start developing with frameworks which are ranked good in this chart, but having no positive effect on their current project. And even if Vaadin would be the Number one framework in this chart, someone picking Vaadin for his next amazon.com would be totally crazy.
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