Battle of the Web Frameworks! Or maybe not…

Just came back from Doterati’s Battle of the Web Frameworks which attempted to provide insight into the pro/cons of four different web frameworks. Definitely informative from a geek perspective, but from a business perspective (for whom the pro/con analysis seemed targeted to) it was quite off the mark.

Two of the four frameworks discussed where what I considered boutique or niche frameworks (Django, and ICEFaces which is an AJAX framework for JSF). The other two, Ruby on Rails and Zend are perhaps the only choices that would make sense to a business looking to establish a development team – based largely on the ability to hire talent, hit the ground running, and finding support/resources for when things go awry.

Strangely enough, one of the most widely-used and well established web frameworks - .NET was completely absent from the discussion. Wtf?! Although I guess this is to be expected by an event whose backers are largely from the open-source community. However, including a more relevant open-source framework such as Apache Struts or CodeIgniter would have made the event a lot more useful and relevant.