Cloud software development platforms: A comparative overview

Doing things “in the cloud” has become ubiquitous, and the cloud has become a rich environment for the use of technology anywhere and anytime to solve problems, connect people, and improve lives. Software engineering paradigms have been shifting during the last decade from “Software-as-a-Product (SaaP)” to “Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)” provided “in the cloud”. The SaaS software paradigm comes with new capabilities and technical challenges for cloud software development, as compared to mobile and stand-alone software development. Distributed multitiered architecting, design, and programming for cloud software development require new strategies specifically motivated by the SaaS paradigm. This paper aims to compare and contrast cloud software development platforms and frameworks, namely, Java platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE); Microsoft platform, .NET framework; Ruby on Rails framework; Zend framework; Node.js framework; and Django (Python) framework. A comparative overview is presented to help cloud software engineers select an appropriate platform/framework to solve a complex problem.