Analyse the risks of ad hoc programming in web development and develop a metrics of appropriate tools

Abstract

Today the World Wide Web has become one of the most powerful tools for business promotion and social networking. As the use of websites and web applications to promote the businesses has increased drastically over the past few years, the complexity of managing them and protecting them from security threats has become a complicated task for the organizations. On the other hand, most of the web projects are at risk and less secure due to lack of quality programming. Although there are plenty of frameworks available for free in the market to improve the quality of programming, most of the programmers use ad hoc programming rather than using frameworks which could save their time and repeated work. The research identifies the different frameworks in PHP and .NET programming, and evaluates their benefits and drawbacks in the web application development. The research aims to help web development companies to minimize the risks involved in developing large web projects and develop a metrics of appropriate frameworks to be used for the specific projects. The study examined the way web applications were developed in different software companies and the advantages of using frameworks while developing them. The findings of the results show that it was not only the experience of developers that motivated them to use frameworks. The major conclusions and recommendations drawn from this research were that the main reasons behind web developers avoiding frameworks are that they are difficult to learn and implement. Also, the motivations factors for programmers towards using frameworks were self-efficiency, habit of learning new things and awareness about the benefits of frameworks. The research recommended companies to use appropriate frameworks to protect their projects against security threats like SQL injection and RSS injectio