Bill Clementson's Blog

Java/Smalltalk Web Framework comparison

Sunday, September 28, 2003

Wafer (Web Application Framework Research project) is a research project that attempts to compare different open source web application frameworks using a common example application. It's aim is "to compare the application frameworks on a level field by specifying an example application so that the application features become irrelevent and the merits of each framework becomes the focus". Chris Double points to a comparison between an implementation of the Wafer weblog specification that was done in Java with the Struts framework and one that was done using Smalltalk with the Seaside framework. Here is a breakdown of some of the numbers:

Metric	Java (Struts)	Smalltalk (Seaside)	Ratio (Java:Smalltalk)
Executable Size (uncompressed)	4.1 MB (yes MB)	26,759 B (yes bytes)	153:1
# of Files	155	1	155:1
Source size	159,554 B	26,759 B	6:1
Classes	36	12	3:1

I would have expected the Smalltalk implementation to be more compact, but these numbers are radically different. It would be really interesting to see some sort of breakdown explaining why the Seaside implementation is so much smaller in size by somebody who knows both Struts and Seaside.