In short

Software development platforms for web applications (such as Java EE, .NET, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, etc.) are among the most critical factors of development productivity today. The pros and cons of the various platforms are by-and-large known in principle, but how the pros trade off against the cons in one platform and how that compares to another platform is the topic of quasi-religious wars only, not a subject of objective analysis, as almost no data is available that allows such direct comparison.
Plat_Forms is a contest that will change this. It will have top-class (and hence comparable) teams of 3 programmers implement the same specification of a web-based application under the same circumstances and thus generate a basis for objective comparison of the various characteristics that the platforms generate.

In just 30 hours, the teams will implement as much of the requested functionality as they can and at the same time optimize the usefulness of the resulting system (functionality, usability, reliability, etc.), the understandability of the code, the modifiability of the system design, the efficiency and scalability. At the end of 30 hours, the teams hand over their source code and a DVD containing a turnkey-runnable VMware configuration of their system.

These items will then be subject to a thorough evaluation according to scientific standards with respect to the criteria mentioned above. As most of the results cannot be quantified and many cannot even be ranked in a neutral fashion, there will be no one-dimensional result ranking of the systems. Rather, there will be an extensive report describing the findings.

There will be no overall "winner" of the contest. However, there will be a winning team per platform. A monetary price will be awarded for each of these teams.

In detail

In the documents below you will find a lot more detail about the contest, with respect to its justification, the exact procedure, technical constraints and infrastructure, rules of behavior, and other things.

• Detailed Plat_Forms contest announcement ("Call for Participation", PDF)
• The requirements document (describing the task tackled by the participants)