Julia Plekhanova
September 2009
Web frameworks provide a golden mean between building an application from scratch and using an out-of-the-box content management system (CMS). This report focuses on three leading open source web development frameworks: Django, Ruby on Rails and CakePHP. All three frameworks have similar architectures and claim to have similar characteristics, such as greatly enhanced productivity and code re-use. This report provides a methodology to evaluate each framework. The methodology, criteria, and weights provided in this report are generic and comprehensive. Each organization should adapt the methodology of this report to its own unique context.
Web development frameworks are influenced by a large number of constantly evolving factors, including social, perceptual, and contextual forces that do not neatly fit into a technical evaluation.
© 2011 The IBIT Report, Institute for Business and Information Technology, Fox School of Business, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA. All rights reserved. ISSN 1938-1271.
