Plat_Forms 2011: Finding emergent properties of web application development platforms

Empirical evidence on emergent properties of different web development platforms when used in a non-trivial setting is rare to non-existent. In this paper we report on an experiment called Plat_Forms 2011 where teams of professional software developers implemented the same specification of a small to medium sized web application using different web development platforms, with 3 to 4 teams per platform. We define platforms by the main programming language used, in our case Java, Perl, PHP, or Ruby. In order to find properties that are similar within a web development platform but different across platforms, we analyzed several characteristics of the teams and their solutions, such as completeness, robustness, structure and aspects of the team´s development process. We found certain characteristics that can be attributed to the platforms used but others that cannot. Our findings also indicate that for some characteristics the programming language might not be the best attribute by which to define the platform anymore.