Frequently Asked Questions

• How are the different frameworks scored?

  Each framework is scored by three separate measures, and these are simply averaged. The three measures are:

  1. Github watchers: Lots of frameworks are hosting their source code on Github these days, which is great since we can see how many people are watching the code for those frameworks. Since we can't measure this for frameworks not on Github, you'll see 'N/A' for those.
  2. Site traffic: We get traffic statistics for the web site for each framework. Unfortunately we can only get statistics for frameworks that have their own domain, so frameworks that are hosted under another domain (for example Wicket lives at http://wicket.apache.org) will show 'N/A' for this score.
  3. Inbound links: The number of inbound likes to the framework's home page.

  Since these three measure of popularity are on different scales and we want to put the final scores on a scale of 0-100, we normalize each measure into a 0-100 score, with the highest framework getting a score of 100. We also put the scores on a log scale since the measures cover such a large range, so for instance a framework with a score of 90 for inbound links may have thousands of links while a framework with a score of 10-20 might just have a handful.

• Why does my favorite framework have such a low score?

  Since scores are simply calculated as an average of the three measures described in the previous question, you can investigate the individual scores as compared to other frameworks to see why your framework places where it does. With Github scores for instance, you can look at how many watchers your framework has and compare it to frameworks with higher scores. Likewise you can compare traffic stats using a service like Alexa or inbound links by doing a Google link search (use "link:myfavoriteframework.com" in the search field). If you still think something is wrong with the score after doing some investigation, please let us know.

• Why isn't my favorite framework listed? It's so cool!

  We'd love to hear about it. Just send us a suggestion and we'll check it out.

  What are your criteria for deciding if something is a "web framework"?

  As a rough guide, if you can finish the sentence "I just built this sweet new web application with [insert name of framework here]", then we probably consider it a web framework. Note that frameworks don't have to be "full-stack", they can be client-side only (like GWT ) or server-side only and qualify. We don't include JavaScript libraries like jQuery and MooTools though since these are typically used to enhance web applications that are built using another framework. Feel free to suggest we add a framework.