# Rational Web Framework Choice

tlpl: Comment déterminer de la façon la plus rationnelle possible le meilleur framework work relativement à vos besoins. Cliquez ici pour aller au résultats. Cet article n’est disponible qu’en anglais.

This is it.
You’ve got the next big idea.
You just need to make a very simple web application.

It sounds easy! You just need to choose a good modern web framework, when suddenly:

After your brain stack overflowed, you decide to use a very simple methodology. Answer two questions:

Which language am I familiar with?
What is the most popular web framework for this language?

Great! This is it.

But, you continually hear this little voice.

This article try to determine in the most objective and rational way the best(s) web framework(s) depending on your needs. To reach this goal, I will provide a decision tool in the result section.

I will use the following methodology:

Methodology

1. Model how to make choice
1. choose important parameters
2. organize (hierarchize) them
3. write down an objective chooser
2. Grab objective quantified informations about web frameworks relatively to choosen parameters
3. Sanitize your data in order to handle imprecisions, lack of informations…
4. Apply the model of choice to your informations

☞ Important Note
I am far from happy to the actual result. There are a lot of biases, for example in the choice of the parameters. The same can be said about the data I gathered. I am using very imprecise informations. But, as far as I know, this is the only article which use many different parameters to help you choose a web framework.

This is why I made a very flexible decision tool:

## Model

Here are the important features (properties/parameters) I selected to make the choice:

1. Popularity, which correlate with:
• number of tested libraries
• facility to find learning material
• ability to find another developer to work with
2. Efficiency, which is generally correlated to:
• how much processing power you’ll need per user
• maintenance price per user
• how long the user will wait to see/update data
3. Expressiveness, which is generally correlated to:
• faster development
4. Robustness, which correlate with:
• security
• fewer bugs

Each feature is quite important and mostly independant from each other. I tried to embrace most important topics concerning web frameworks with these four properties. I am fully concious some people might lack another important feature. Nonetheless the methodology used here can be easily replicated. If you lack an important property add it at will and use this choice method.

Also each feature is very hard to measure with precision. This is why we will only focus on order of magnitude.

For each property a framework could have one of the six possible values: Excellent, Very Good, Good, Medium, Bad or Very Bad

So how to make a decision model from these informations?

One of the most versatile method is to give a weight for each cluster value. And to select the framework maximizing this score:

score(framework) = efficiency + robustness + expressiveness + popularity

For example:

 Expressiveness 10 7 1 -∞ -∞ -∞ Popularity 5 5 4 3 2 1 Efficiency 10 8 6 4 2 1 Robustness 10 8 6 4 2 1

Using this weighted table, that means:

• we discard the three least expressive clusters.
• We don’t make any difference between excellent and very good in popularity.
• Concerning efficient framework in excellent cluster will have 2 more points than the “very good” cluster.

So for each framework we compute its score relatively to a weighted table. And we select the best(s).

Example: Using this hypothetic framework and the preceeding table.

Expressiveness Popularity Efficiency Robustness
yog Excellent Very Bad Medium Very Good
score(yog) = 10 + 0 + 4 + 8 = 22

Most needs should be expressed by such a weighted table. In the result section, we will discuss this further.

It is now time to try to get these measures.

## Objective measures

None of the four properties I choosen can be measured with perfect precision. But we could get the order of magnitude for each.

I tried to focus on the framework only. But it is often easier to start by studying the language first.

For example, I have datas about popularity by language and I also have different datas concerning popularity by framework. Even if I use only the framework focused datas in my final decision model, it seemed important to me to discuss about the datas for the languages. The goal is to provide a tool to help decision not to give a decision for you.

### Popularity

RedMonk Programming Language Rankings (January 2013) provide an apparent good measure of popularity. While not perfect the current measure feel mostly right. They create an image using stack overflow and github data. Vertical correspond to the number of questions on stackoverflow. Horizontal correspond to the number of projects on github.

If you look at the image, your eye can see about four clusters. The 1 cluster correspond to mainstream languages:

Most developer know at least one of these language.

The second cluster is quite bigger. It seems to correspond to languages with a solid community behind them.

I don’t get into detail, but you could also see third and fourth tier popular languages.

So:

Mainstream: JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, C#, C++, C, Objective-C, Perl, Shell

Good: Scala, Haskell, Visual Basic, Assembly, R, Matlab, ASP, ActionScript, Coffeescript, Groovy, Clojure, Lua, Prolog

Medium: Erlang, Go, Delphi, D, Racket, Scheme, ColdFusion, F#, FORTRAN, Arduino, Tcl, Ocaml

I don’t thing I could find easily web frameworks for third or fourth tier languages.

For now, I only talked about language popularity. But what about framework popularity? I made a test using number of question on stackoverflow only. Then by dividing by two for each 6 cluster:

Cluster Language Framework #nb %
Excellent Ruby Rails 176208 100%
Very Good Python Django 57385 <50%
Java Servlet 54139
Java Spring 31641
Node.js node.js 27243
PHP Codeigniter 21503
Groovy Grails 20222
Good Ruby Sinatra 8631 <25%
PHP Laravel 6982
PHP Kohana 5959
Node.js Express 5009
Medium PHP Cake 4554 <13%
C♯ ServiceStack 3838
Scala Play 3823
Java Wicket 3819
Dart Dart 3753
PHP Slim 3361
Scala Lift 2844
Go Go 2689
C♯ aspnet 1000
PHP Silex 750
PHP Lithium 732
C♯ nancy 705
Very bad Java Grizzly 622 <3%
Erlang Cowboy 568
Perl Dancer 496
PHP Symphony2 491
Go Revel 459
Clojure Compojure 391
Perl Mojolicious 376
Scala Scalatra 349
Scala Finagle 336
PHP Phalcon 299
js Ringo 299
Java Gemini 276
Perl Plack 257
Erlang Elli 230
Java Dropwizard 188
PHP Yaf 146
Java Play1 133
Node.js Hapi 131
Java Vertx 60
Scala Unfiltered 42
C onion 18
Clojure http-kit 17
Perl Kelp 16
PHP Micromvc 13
Lua Openresty 8
C++ cpoll-cppsp 5
Clojure Luminus 3
PHP Phreeze 1

As we can see, our framework popularity indicator can be quite different from its language popularity. For now I didn’t found a nice way to merge the results from RedMonk with these one. So I’ll use these unperfect one. Hopefully the order of magninute is mostly correct for most framework.

### Efficiency

Another objective measure is efficiency. We all know benchmarks are all flawed. But they are the only indicators concerning efficiency we have.

I used the benchmark from benchmarksgame. Mainly, there are five clusters:

 1x→2x C, C++ 2x→3x Java 7, Scala, OCamL, Haskell, Go, Common LISP 3x→10x C♯, Clojure, Racket, Dart 10x→30x Erlang 30x→ PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, JRuby

Remarks concerning some very slow languages:

• PHP ; huge variations, can be about 1.5x C speed in best case.
• Python ; huge variations, can be about 1.5x C speed in best case
• Perl ; Can be about 3x C speed in best case
• Ruby, JRuby ; mostly very slow.

This is a first approach. The speed of the language for basic benchmarks. But, here we are interrested in web programming. Fortunately techempower has made some tests focused on most web frameworks:

These benchmark doesn’t fit well with our needs. The values are certainly quite imprecise to your real usage. The goal is just to get an order of magnitude for each framework. Another problem is the high number of informations.

As always, we should remember these informations are also imprecise. So I simply made some classes of efficiency.

Remark: I separated the clusters by using power of 2 relatively to the fastest.

Cluster Language Framework #nb slowness
Excellent C++ cpoll-cppsp 114,711
Jav gemini 105,204
Lua openresty 93,882
Jav servlet 90,580
C++ cpoll-pool 89,167
Go go 76,024
Sca finagle 68,413
Go revel 66,990
Jav rest-express 63,209
Very Good Jav wicket 48,772 >2×
Sca scalatra 48,594
Clj http-kit 42,703
Jav spring 36,643 >3×
PHP php 36,605
Jav tapestry 35,032
Clj compojure 32,088
JS ringo 31,962
Jav dropwizard 31,514
Clj luminus 30,672
Good Sca play-slick 29,950 >4×
Sca unfiltered 29,782
Erl elli 28,862
Jav vertx 28,075
JS nodejs 27,598
Erl cowboy 24,669
C onion 23,649
Hkl yesod 23,304
JS express 22,856 >5×
Sca play-scala 22,372
Jav g rizzly-jersey 20,550
PHP phalcon 18,481
Grv grails 18,467
Prl plack 16,647 >7×
PHP yaf 14,388
Medium JS hapi 11,235 >10×
Jav play1 9,979
Hkl snap 9,196
Prl kelp 8,250
Jav play-java 7,905
Jav p lay-java-jpa 7,846
PHP micromvc 7,387
Prl dancer 5,040 >20×
Prl mojolicious 4,371
JS ringo-conv 4,249
Py django 4,026
PHP codeigniter 3,809 >30×
Sca lift 3,311
PHP slim 3,112
PHP kohana 2,378 >40×
PHP silex 2,364
Very Bad PHP laravel 1,639 >60×
PHP phreeze 1,410
PHP lithium 1,410
PHP fuel 1,410
PHP cake 1,287 >80×
PHP symfony2 879 >100×
C# aspnet-mvc 871
Rby sinatra 561 >200×
C# servicestack 51
Dar dart 0
C# nancy 0
Prl web-simple 0

These are manually made clusters. But you get the idea. Certainly, some framework could jump between two different clusters. So this is something to remember. But as always, the order of magnitude is certainly mostly right.

# Expressiveness

Now, how to objectively measure expressiveness?

After filtering languages suitable for web development, we end up with some clusters:

Cluster Languages
Very Good Racket, Groovy, R, Scala, OCamL, F♯, Erlang, Lisp, Go
Medium Perl, Python, Objective-C, Scheme, Tcl, Ruby
Bad Lua, Fortran (free-format), PHP, Java, C++, C♯

Unfortunately there is no information about dart. So I simply give a very fast look at the syntax. As it looked a lot like javascript and js is quite low. I decided to put it close to java.

Also an important remark, javascript score very badly here while coffeescript (compiling to js) score “excellent”. So if you intend to use a javascript framework but only with coffescript that should change substantially the score. As I don’t believe it is the standard. Javascript oriented framework score very badly regarding expressiveness.

Cluster Language Framework
Excellent Clj luminus
Clj http-kit
Clj compojure
Hkl snap
Hkl yesod
Very Good Erl elli
Erl cowboy
Go go
Go revel
Grv grails
Sca lift
Sca finagle
Sca scalatra
Sca play-scala
Sca play-slick
Sca unfiltered
Medium Prl kelp
Prl plack
Prl dancer
Prl web-simple
Prl mojolicious
Py django
Rby rails
Rby sinatra
C# aspnet-mvc
C# servicestack
C++ cpoll-pool
C++ cpoll-cppsp
Dar dart
Jav play1
Jav vertx
Jav gemini
Jav spring
Jav wicket
Jav servlet
Jav tapestry
Jav play-java
Jav dropwizard
Jav rest-express
Jav play-java-jpa
Jav grizzly-jersey
Lua openresty
PHP php
PHP yaf
PHP cake
PHP fuel
PHP slim
PHP silex
PHP kohana
PHP laravel
PHP lithium
PHP phalcon
PHP phreeze
PHP micromvc
PHP symfony2
PHP codeigniter
JS hapi
JS ringo
JS nodejs
JS express
JS ringo-conv

### Robustness

I couldn’t find any complete study to give the number of bug relatively to each framework/language.

But one thing I saw from experience is the more powerful the type system the safest your application is. While the type system doesn’t remove completely the need to test your application a very good type system tend to remove complete classes of bug.

Typically, not using pointer help to reduce the number of bugs due to bad references. Also, using a garbage collector, reduce greatly the probability to access unallocated space.

From my point of view, robustness is mostly identical to safety.

Here are the clusters:

 Excellent Haskell, Scheme, Erlang Very Good Scala, Java, Clojure Good Ruby, Python, Groovy, javascript, PHP Medium C++, C#, Perl, Objective-C, Go, C

So applying this to frameworks gives the following clusters:

Cluster Language Framework
Excellent Erl elli
Erl cowboy
Hkl snap
Hkl yesod
Very Good Clj luminus
Clj http-kit
Clj compojure
Jav play1
Jav vertx
Jav gemini
Jav spring
Jav wicket
Jav servlet
Jav tapestry
Jav play-java
Jav dropwizard
Jav rest-express
Jav play-java-jpa
Jav grizzly-jersey
Sca lift
Sca finagle
Sca scalatra
Sca play-scala
Sca play-slick
Sca unfiltered
Good Grv grails
JS hapi
JS ringo
JS nodejs
JS express
JS ringo-conv
Lua openresty
PHP php
PHP yaf
PHP cake
PHP fuel
PHP slim
PHP silex
PHP kohana
PHP laravel
PHP lithium
PHP phalcon
PHP phreeze
PHP micromvc
PHP symfony2
PHP codeigniter
Py django
Rby rails
Rby sinatra
Medium C onion
C# nancy
C# aspnet-mvc
C# servicestack
C++ cpoll-pool
C++ cpoll-cppsp
Dar dart
Go go
Go revel
Prl kelp
Prl plack
Prl dancer
Prl web-simple
Prl mojolicious

## The result

For the result I initialized the table with my own needs.

And I am quite happy it confirms my current choice. I sware I didn’t given yesod any bonus point. I tried to be the most objective and factual as possible.

Now, it is up to you to enter your preferences.

On each line you could change how important a feature is for you. From essential to unsignificant. Of course you could change the matrix at will.

I just show a top 10 frameworks. In order to give a more understandable measure I provide the log of the score.

Expressiveness
Popularity
Efficiency
Robustness

I didn’t had the courage in explaining in what the scoring system is good. Mostly, if you use product instead of sum for the score you could use power of e for the values in the matrix. And you could see the matrix as a probability matrix (each line sum to 1). Which provide a slighly better intuition on whats going on.

Remember only that values are exponential. Do not double an already big value for example the effect would be extreme.

## Conclusion

All of this is based as most as I could on objective data. The choice method seems both rather rational and classical. It is now up to you to edit the score matrix to set your needs.

I know that in the current state there are many flaws. But it is a first system to help make a choice rationally.

I encourage you to go further if you are not satisfied by my method.

The source code for the matrix shouldn’t be too hard to read. Just read the source of this webpage. You could change the positionning of some frameworks if you believe I made some mistake by placing them in some bad clusters.