A Comparative Study of Web Development Technologies Using Open Source and Proprietary Software?

A web application is a distributed application that runs on more than one computer and communicates through a network or a server. Specifically, a web application is accessed with a web browser as a client and provides the ability to update and maintain a program without deploying and installing software on client computers. Web programmers today are confronted with the difficulty of having to work with constantly changing technologies, and having to make the right choice of which development technology to use. This paper presents a comparison of web application development technologies using open source software and proprietary software. The comparison involves three major web development technologies namely: Java Server Pages (JSP), Active Server Pages (ASP.NET) and PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP). For the comparison to take place, a web application was developed in all three technologies using the same requirements. The model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern was employed in developing the web application, and the parameters for the comparison are cost of implementation, browser compatibility, response time of HTTP requests, operating system compatibility and mobile platform compatibility.