Apparently, 1995 was a very good year. But wait, I get ahead of myself!
Recently I had a conversation with a friend about CMSes. We were confused, disagreeing on whether “Django” was a CMS or a web application framework. Neither of us was entirely sure, both of us being developers in the Microsoft stack.
Given that looking for (meta-)comparisons, and coming up with (sometimes far fetched or even disrespectful) parallels is a “secret” hobby of mine. So why not attempt to insult as many technology zealots in one go as I can by comparing popular technologies? At the very least I’d find out if Django is a CMS or web framework.
Turns out it is both.
Of course, finding parallels is hard and at times nearly impossible. Platforms and technologies differ and overlap at times, making a tabular comparison quite a challenge. Here’s my (first) attempt at a comparison:
| Web App Framework(s) | Example CMS(es) | Package Manager(s) | IDEs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
C# (and VB.NET)Current: 5.0 |
ASP.NET: WebForms & MVC | DotNetNuke, Orchard | NuGet | Visual Studio, MonoDevelop, SharpDevelop |
JavaCurrent: 8 |
Spring, JSF, Struts, Google Web Toolkit, etc. | Liferay, Hippo, Open CMS, Pulse | Maven | Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans |
PHPCurrent: 5.6.0 |
Zend 2, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symfony | WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! | Composer | PhpStorm, PHPEclipse, Zend Studio, NetBeans, Sublime Text |
RubyCurrent: 2.1.2 |
Ruby on Rails | Radiant, Refinery, BrowserCMS | RubyGems | n/a |
PythonCurrent: 3.4.1 |
Django | Django-CMS, Plone | Pip, PyPM | n/a |
JavaScript (Node)Current: 5 |
Node.js | Ghost, KeystoneJS, Hatch.js, Calipso | npm | n/a |
Perl 5Current: 5 |
Catalyst, Dancer, Mojolicious | Bricolage | nCPAN, PPM | n/a |
There were two main takeaways from this comparison for me. First, apparently “Django” is a Python web application framework, and “Django-CMS” is, well: a CMS. Second, 1995 was a very good year: Wikipedia lists 4 out of 7 languages as originating in 1995.
Guess it was a very good year.