A comparative study of maintainability of web applications on J2EE, .NET and Ruby on Rails

With Web services predicted to become distributed computing architecture in near future, maintainability of the Web applications (WAs) will rank high on selection criteria while choosing a platform for development of a WA. The goal of this paper is to evaluate maintainability of small-scale WAs built on J2EE, .NET and Ruby On Rails (RoR). The maintainability criteria considered comprised of modifiability, testability, understandability and portability. We found that the RoR implementation fared better on modifiability, testability, and understandability, while J2EE implementation was the most portable. The results led us to comment on the maintainability of small WAs with respect to underlying architecture and development environments the three platforms provide. We believe that results are expected to vary for medium and large-size WAs. The work included here is part of an effort to build a decision framework for platform selection for WAs.