SANTA CRUZ, Calif.--BUSINESS WIRE--Microsoft .NET was rated the best overall framework by software developers who use it in Evans Data Corp's newly released Users’ Choice Survey on Frameworks. The survey asked developers to rank ten different attributes of the frameworks they have used. The two Google offerings – App Engine and Web Toolkit GWT – came in just slightly behind Microsoft in overall satisfaction, but Rails was near the bottom.

“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.”

Developers were also asked to rank the categories themselves according to importance. Ease of use was the highest rated attribute of a framework, followed by performance and extensibility.

"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. "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.”

This survey is the latest release from the Users’ Choice Series in which global developers and IT managers rate the capabilities of various tools and products they use.

Other highlights of the survey include:

• Ease of Use cited as most important feature in a Web Development Platform or Framework trumping performance and extensibility attributes.
• Apache Axis, an open source framework for developing Java web applications, received the top ranking, when it came to performance.
• Object Inheritance, the ability to create new objects within an application using objects that have already been defined, ranked the least important feature among developers.

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About Evans Data Corporation

Evans Data Corporation provides regularly updated IT industry market intelligence based on in-depth surveys of the global developer population. Evans' syndicated research includes surveys focused on developers in a wide variety of subjects.

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