State of the Art

July 6, 2005

This article is a copy of a research work I did today, to draw a map of today’s development technologies. It is not finished (it will never be, actually) but I think it is rather interesting. Hope you find it interesting too :)

Technology Chart

Because software development is an art… the following table gives a quick overview of available object-oriented application blocks & frameworks, with references. This list is not intensive and will most likely change in the future.

	Java	.NET	PHP	JavaScript
Unit Testing	JUnit	NUnit, NMock, TestDriven.NET	PhpUnit	JSUnit
Code Documentation	Javadoc	XML Code Comments + NDoc	PHPDoctor	JSDoc
Build tools	Ant	NAnt	n/a	n/a
Persistence	Hibernate, iBATIS	NHibernate, Olero ORM, iBATIS, NPersist; Article about Solutions for object persistence in the .NET architecture	Propel	n/a
Web Applications	Spring Framework, Struts, Velocity, JavaServerFaces	Spring.NET, ASP.NET, Castle Project	n/a	n/a
Smart Clients	JFC/Swing	Windows Forms	PHP-GTK	XUL
Aspect-Oriented Programming	AspectJ	AspectSharp, SetPoint	aoPHP	JavaScript and AOP
AJAX	For Java, JSON-RPC	For .NET	JPSPAN, Flexible AJAX, AjaxAC	n/a
Logging	log4j	log4net	log4php	n/a
IDE	Sun Java Studio Creator, Eclipse, Borland JBuilder, IntelliJ IDEA, Apple Xcode, NetBeans, JCreator, BlueJ, NetComputing AnyJ, DrJava	Visual Studio.NET, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Eclipse, Borland Delphi, #develop, Mainsoft Visual MainWin for Linux, ASP.NET WebMatrix, CodeSmithStudio	Eclipse, NuSphere, IDE.PHP, Macromedia Dreamweaver	Eclipse, Macromedia Dreamweaver
Business Rules Engine	JESS, JxBRE, ILOG	NxBRE, InRule, ILOG	n/a	n/a

	Apple Macintosh	Microsoft Alternative	C++	Ruby on Rails
Unit Testing	OCUnit	Visual Studio Team System	CppUnit	Test::Unit
Code Documentation	HeaderDoc	n/a	CppDoc	RDoc
Build tools	Ant	MSBuild	GNU Make	Rant
Persistence	CoreData, DataCrux	ObjectSpaces	Progress EdgeXtend	Ruby on Rails
Web Applications	WebObjects	Classic ASP (unsupported & unsupportable)	ASP.NET, C++ Server Pages	Ruby on Rails, Comparison of Ruby on Rails against Spring + Hibernate
Smart Clients	Cocoa	Avalon + XAML, MFC	n/a	n/a
Aspect-Oriented Programming	AspectCocoa	Native .NET functionality	AspectC++	AspectR
AJAX	(idem Java)	Announced	n/a	Ruby on Rails
Logging	log4cocoa	Enterprise Library’s Logging Application Block	log4cpp	log4r
IDE	Apple Xcode, Metrowerks CodeWarrior	n/a	Eclipse, Apple Xcode, Metrowerks CodeWarrior, Microsoft Visual C++, Borland C++ Builder, Bloodshed Software Dev-C++	Mondrian, Arachno Ruby, Eclipse
Business Rules Engine	n/a	n/a	ILOG	n/a

Global information

Some information about the object-oriented application frameworks above:

Platform	Main Programming Languages	ISO Standard	Inspired from
Java	Java		NeXT OpenStep, C++
.NET	C#, Visual Basic.NET, Java, JavaScript, C++	(C#: ISO 23270, CLI: ISO 23271 & 23272)	Java, COM
PHP	PHP		C
JavaScript	JavaScript	(ISO 16262)	Self, C (NOT from Java!)
Cocoa	Objective-C, Java, C++		NeXT OpenStep, Smalltalk
C++ STL + GCC	C++	(ISO 14882)	C
Ruby on Rails	Ruby		Eiffel, Ada, Perl

(Useless) Comments

As you can see, there are common patterns appearing in the table above:

Eclipse can build whatever you want
.NET-related project names tend to begin with the letter N
PHP-related project names tend to begin with the letter P
JavaScript-related project names tend to begin with JS
Ruby-related project names tend to begin or end with R
Logging frameworks have all the same log4xxx name
Java-related project names tend to… come from Indonesia :)

From an historical point of view, however, the fact that most object-oriented frameworks (that is, those not based on a scripting language) use single inheritance is interesting, and not casual: Objective-C, used for the development of the software created for the NeXT workstation, introduced the notion of “interfaces” first (originally named “protocols”), and this idea was taken lately to Java and .NET.