Comparison of Web Frameworks

Vladimir Tsvetkov wrote: “It’s interesting weather someone really tried to approach this from more scientific point of view?”
Of course there should be a scientific approach to the comparison of Java Web Frameworks.

... And as any scientific approach that should better end with some numbers. Those from the matrix indeed give little. Giving "the same requirements to 10 teams ..." would be a good idea, if not so expensive. Besides this approach - when each team is "highly-specialized in one particular framework" does not cover the learning curve. Probably taking 100 randomly chosen teams would be better. That is indeed a scientific approach, but out of pure experimental science.

Speaking more seriously we may remember something (alas, mostly forgotten) from early days of science of programming, specifically the things about complexity and the relative levels of programming languages. Things like that are indeed measurable.

Applied to Web Frameworks we may think about some imaginable average Web application with typical functionality as a working entity and then go back in time and estimate the size of same application from the point of view of developer's effort. The developers creatively write what they think about the product developed using certain language, or rather a set of languages defined by technology (aka framework). That includes programming language of course (and you are not going to use Cobol, right?) and other things like configurations, HTML used in various ways and so on. The level of this combined language is high if the given framework permits to code the project with lesser number of operators.

As said experimental parallel programming of test project is not realistic (though the history knows some examples), but same as for comparison languages+compilers some artificial but sophisticated test sets may be developed with time. Programming such a test might take maximum a few days from any team "highly-specialized in one particular framework".

As an example and possibly as a staring point I may suggest a set of tests I have developed to test my own framework - see http://www.hybridjava.com:8080/HJ_Sample/