InfoQ's Top 20 Web Frameworks for the JVM

back in early october, infoq.com published a community research article titled top 20 web frameworks for the jvm . there goal seemed to be fairly simple:

using the new community research tool, we at infoq want to get your opinions on the relative importance and maturity of a variety of web frameworks that are targeted for the jvm. please vote by dragging each practice across two dimensions – how important is the framework relative to the other frameworks, and how much is it actually used in real teams and projects.

when i first saw this article, i noticed some strange web frameworks listed. namely, netty, sitemesh and spark. i haven't heard of many folks using netty for a web framework, but i'm sure it's possible. sitemesh is certainly not a web framework and i've never even heard of spark. and where is gwt and vaadin? regardless of the choices, i went ahead and voted.

last week, infoq posted their top content for october on facebook.

• top 20 web frameworks for the jvm 25,992 pv
• ruby on rails vs. node.js at linkedin 11,904 pv
• mobile webdev: the horror 11,150 pv
• a brief introduction to rest 8,872 pv
• kanban and scrum - making the most of both 7,665 pv

first of all, it's interesting to see that jvm web frameworks is still a hot topic for developers. whenever i do my comparing jvm web frameworks talk at conferences, i always see a few jabs about "he's still doing that talk!?" yes, it seems strange that a talk i first did in 2004 is still in high demand.

secondly, i think infoq does good in showing how the frameworks ranked and showing their heatmaps . below are their rankings from 1109 participants.

according to this research, the top 5 web frameworks for the jvm are spring mvc, play, grails, jsf and struts (i hope those surveyed meant struts 2, not struts 1).

in my research from last february (slide 21), i ranked them (with no particular weightings) as grails, gwt, jruby on rails, spring mvc and vaadin. so i guess you could say i got 2 out of 5 right (grails and spring mvc). not bad considering infoq didn't even consider gwt and vaadin.

another intriguing data point in this study is each frameworks' heatmap. for example, below are heatmaps for the top 4 frameworks.

notice how grails and spring mvc are both hotter in the bottom right corner? it seems the community's overall opinions of these two frameworks are more aligned than jsf and play, which a fair amount of folks rank as hyped and unimportant.

what i really like about this research is it's the communities opinions, visualized. it also confirms that some of my favorite frameworks are still on top. i don't know if jsf belongs as a top framework, however it seems a lot of folks do. i recently thought about removing it from appfuse , but decided to keep it (at least for the next release). i hope infoq does more research projects like this, especially if they get their list of web frameworks right.