Java:

• Accenture (http://www.accenture.de)
• Cordys (http://www.cordys.com)
• SIB Visions (http://www.sibvisions.com)
• Kayak (http://www.kayak.com)

Perl:

• #austria.pm
• Perl Ecosystem Group (http://perl-ecosystem.org)
• Shadowcat (http://www.shadowcat.co.uk)

Für PHP:

• Globalpark (http://www.globalpark.com)
• Mayflower (http://www.mayflower.de)
• Mindworks (http://www.mindworks.de)
• TYPO3 Association (http://typo3.org)

Ruby:

• Infopark (http://www.infopark.de)
• Lesscode (http://www.lesscode.de)
• makandra (http://www.makandra.de)
• tmp8 (http://tmp8.de)

In addition, an extra team will participate outside the competition. Upstream Agile (http://upstre.am) will solve the given task using JavaScript, to run on both the server and client. Despite the absence of the minimum 3 teams for their category, the FU Berlin selection committee considered JavaScript to be an important future trend and accepted Upstream Agile’s team application. The results of this team will be evaluated in a special section of the scientific appraisal.

Other applications for alternative web development platforms were not accepted on the basis that the minimum requirement of 3 teams per category was not met. These were dotnet (one applicant), Phyton (two applicants) and TCF (one applicant). As the organizers of Plat_forms, FU Berlin and OSBF extend an invitation to these teams for the 2012 competition in the hope of seeing these web technologies participate next time round.

Plat_forms is brought to you by the OSBF in cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin, iX Magazin, Microsoftand ICANS as major sponsors.

Web development technology compared with surprising results

Winners of the international programmer competition "Plat_Forms" were announced by organizers OSBF (previously Linux Business Campus) and the Freien Universität Berlin. Scientific evaluations of development platforms Java, PHP and Perl, the first of its kind are now available.

Three teams of three professional software developers took on the challenge to develop the same web application using their corresponding platform – Java, Perl and PHP. Limited to two days and under the supervision of Freie Universität Berlin, the goal was to make a methodical comparison of the technologies used. Participating teams enjoyed the opportunity to develop their own performance profiles of the platforms, to guide their future decisions on the most appropriate technology for customer projects.

The developed web application needed to meet 150 specifications culminating to a community forum with registration, personality tests and complex search and HTML page overviews as well as a web service interface on SOAP and WSDL.

Realized features: Solutions created on PHP demonstrated more functionality than those on Perl and the Java based solutions varied immensely in their range of features.

Security vulnerabilities: Two of the PHP solutions and one of the Perl, were vulnerable to Javascript cross site scripting. Disturbances were visible in one solution from both Java and Perl (but none from PHP), upon attempts to inject SQL scripts. Even if intrusion is successfully obstructed, this is no ideal behavior. Surpisingly, the infamously unsafe PHP performed well in this area.

Program size: The Perl solutions were the most compact, whereas the Java solutions most comprehensive.

Other findings: The three platforms were rated the same on many areas, as the differences between the teams within a platform grouping were often greater than between the platforms. This highlights the understanding that which developer is more important than which technology is employed.

The results in detail along with more information, can be found at www.plat-forms.org