HotFrameworks

New inbound link data source

Our previous data source for inbound link statistics is no longer available, so we've switched to using a new and more stable source for this data, Yahoo's Site Explorer Inbound Links API. The new Yahoo inbound link numbers seem reasonable and still show frameworks we know are popular having high scores, but they do differ enough from the old numbers that they have affected the rankings, so for instance CodeIgniter now outranks Ruby on Rails. This is a good reminder that these statistics are not the absolute truth when it comes to popularity, but rather are general indicators of popularity that can help you figure out what frameworks might be interesting to check out.

Ranking the languages used by web frameworks

After the last post looking at the breakdown of frameworks by language, it seemed like it would also be interesting to see not just how many frameworks there were per language, but how popular each language was based on the frameworks using it. In order to do that, we had to come up with a way of scoring languages. One approach would be to take the average score of all the frameworks using that language, but this would give low scores to languages that had lots of low-scoring frameworks even if it had some very high scoring ones at the top of the charts. Instead, we're adding up all the statistics for the frameworks using a language, so for instance for the github score we add up the github watchers for all the frameworks. After that the languages are scored against each other just like we do with frameworks. See the result:

Language rankings by popularity

As I'm writing this it looks like Ruby has the lead, with PHP, Java and Python following fairly closely.

100 web frameworks ranked

We're up to 100 frameworks that we're tracking popularity statistics for here at HotFrameworks, so it seemed like an interesting time to look at how those are divided up across languages:

PHP - 20
Perl - 18
Java - 13
Ruby - 13
JavaScript - 12
ActionScript - 8
Python - 6
Erlang - 4
Scala - 2
Groovy - 1
Objective-J - 1
Smalltalk - 1

Notice the list only adds up to 99? Well, that's because of the unique multi-language PureMVC, which I decided to leave out. Know any great frameworks for some of the underrepresented languages? Please drop us a suggestion!

14 popular PHP web frameworks

We've just added 11 new PHP frameworks to our rankings, bringing the total to 14. These new additions didn't upset the top 4 existing frameworks Zend, CodeIgniter, Symfony and CakePHP, but there are some close followers now including Kohana and Horde. See how they all stack up in our PHP rankings page.

Node.js is hot!

With the appearance of the node.js evented I/O framework, there's been a Cambrian explosion of new web frameworks (not to mention other modules) using it. Here are the node.js-based frameworks recently added to HotFrameworks:

Last week Vroom showed a 13 point increase in popularity. Don't be surprised if more of these frameworks start climbing through the rankings.