29 ms·

Why I Hate Frameworks

199 points by gavingmiller 15y ago

MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
The problem here is that frameworks all operate on different levels, with differing amounts of abstraction, and at some point, you do want that generic, powerful functionality. To perhaps extend the metaphor, if I want to build a spice rack, I don't want to go out into the forest, determine which kind of tree will produce the correct kind of wood, cut it down, trim and plane my planks, and all the other steps which are entailed by wood acquisition. I just want to go to my local hardware/home improvement store and request precut wood. This poster has gone ahead and made assumptions about the nature of resource acquisition which massively simplified his workload and which people normally take for granted in modern life, and as a result, his spice rack will get assembled much quicker. I'm choosing the networking stack as a reasonable example of a framework niche which generally fulfills people's needs without getting in the way and causing the problems he's talking about. Node, Event Machine, Twisted, MINA, etc.
- anrope 15y ago
  Good point about there being different levels of frameworks/tools. What's important is using the right tools for the job. Sometimes you might need the high level, very abstract framework, but it's not cool if that ends up being the only tool available.
m3thos 15y ago
classical argument of frameworks vs libraries.
salsakran 15y ago
I think it's hard to appreciate the post if you haven't worked in J2EE land back in that era (2005). Just reading that gave me bad flashbacks. "Frameworks", especially on the webstack side of things have gotten a lot saner over the years. I imagine if he had seen something like Play!, he'd have a very different opinion.
- abrimo 15y ago
  Yea, I was researching frameworks for our software (https://mijura.com https://mijura.com) and I had all but given up on Java until I found play framework. It's like Ruby on Rails meets Java, very well designed and the views are in Groovy. It's also under active development and the community is quite strong.
- kaffiene 15y ago
  What I find frustrating is the pervading opinion that all of Java = 2005 era J2EE
jowiar 15y ago
What was the state of "frameworks" in 2005, particularly in Java-land. Struts? Spring? Anything that didn't make you want to gouge your eyes out? Even outside of Java-land, Rails had yet to hit 1.0, and Django was just starting. The evolution of the framework has come a long way in 6 years, and frameworks have become less "one size fits all" and more task-appropriate. I think a more appropriate title for this post is: "Why I Hate circa-2005 Java Frameworks"
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  A "2005" in the title would be good. Then I would know that I needn't rush to read this, as I read it in the original.
- lr 15y ago
  WebObjects was in its prime in 2005, and ran circles around everything out there (Java or not). Even in it's completely unsupported (by Apple) state today, it probably still runs circles around most of the frameworks.
- harisenbon 15y ago
  Knowing this was from 2005 would have been helpful. Having the date be written at the very bottom of the article didn't make things any better. While many of his points are valid, his comparison of carpentry to using a framework takes a very select view of what goes into building something. Of course you need a hammer to build a house, just like you need an if-else statement to build a webpage. If you're building a 10 page webapp (spicerack ) you probably don't need a framework. If you're building a full-fledged web-system (house) you don't need a framework, but you'll be much more productive for having one.
  - yxhuvud 15y ago
    Need a framework? Perhaps not, but I'd still use Sinatra for problems of that size since it helps keeping simple things simple.
- deepGem 15y ago
  Yep, 2005 was the era of Spring and Struts 1.0. Now, if that was not enough, someone in our project had built wrappers around Spring !!!. Key requirement for reading through that code - a bottle of scotch.
dools 15y ago
The most important statement in this article is near the beginning, and it's still relevant today: "I've done small woodworking projects before, and I think I have a pretty good idea of what I need: some wood and a few basic tools: a tape measure, a saw, a level, and a hammer." The reason I hate frameworks (even things like Django which is very easy to get started with) is that, at some point, I'm asked to re-learn a different way of solving a problem that I've already solved in the past. I've been doing lots of thinking about this having written the Great American PHP Framework myself, and worked with other people's frameworks, and also worked a lot in the CMS space and the biggest conclusion that I've come to is that the best tools are those that enable you to do things faster or more conveniently but don't actually provide any abstraction. For example, when deploying a website there are any number of tools to "abstract away" the HTML layer - templating engines, markups, markdowns etc. etc. but the best way to build HTML is using HTML and testing in a web browser, always. When you need to write some code in whatever web framework you're using to handle a POST request, you want to be as close as possible to the HTTP layer without a bunch of arcane systems in between you and what you and the underlying technology. Sure it's handy to have tools which automate some repetitive aspects, but if you understand the underlying principles and you know the syntax of the language you're working with, you should at all times be able to just "get it done" however you know how without reading endless documentation and shoehorning your knowledge through a bunch of layers of abstraction. The same goes for ORM - I want convenience of access to my data, and some automation to handle some of the more boring aspects of writing SQL, but I need to be able to mix and match (yes I know most ORMs allow you to use raw SQL, but it's always one or the other - the ORM or the SQL - I've never used a tool that has a simple method for me to extend the ORM bits halfway through the query building process with some custom SQL). This is my zeitgeist now and it pervades all the projects I'm working on. [1] http://www.decalcms.com/ http://www.decalcms.com/
- Spyro7 15y ago
  "I've never used a tool that has a simple method for me to extend the ORM bits halfway through the query building process with some custom SQL" Well, I am not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but Django's ORM allows you to write custom SQL and then collect the resulting rows as objects. You can also circumvent the object layer entirely and deal directly with the SQL. Take a look at this page: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/sql/ https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/sql/ I have found this functionality to be incredibly valuable for quite a few of the projects that I have worked on.
Volpe 15y ago
"I'm currently in the planning stages of building a hosted Java web application..." Seriously, people are starting NEW projects with Java as the language of choice? Despite the plethora of 'better' languages you can run on a JVM.
- rjd 15y ago
  I sugest reading the article and don't take thigns out of context. - First it's from 2005 (when was Java made open source.. 2006?). I'm no expert in the JVM but I guess any signifcant community gains where made after 2006. - Secondly he makes it perfectly clear he no choice "yes, it has to be Java, for a variety of reasons that I don't feel like going into right now" That aside many people still choose Java for various reasons over other languages. Hell I'm still doing .net 1.1 and VB6 work for clients.
- watchandwait 15y ago
  Article is from 2005. I do think the framework situation has improved a lot since then.
- icebraining 15y ago
  I am. I'm building it as something to show to prospective employers and Java is still the de-facto language 'round here. I'll probably rewrite a good part in Scala, though, after I finish the first version.
- ecopoesis 15y ago
  Why the hate on Java? Sure it's not sexy, but: 1) Almost everyone knows it so hiring is easy. 2) There's a very large community that supports its tools, infrastructure and libraries. 3) It's faster then almost anything else out there. 4) It has migration routes (via Scala or Clojure) to sexier languages. As far as I can tell, the only drawbacks to Java are that it's not cool, that's it's verbose and that's it's ugly. Any half decent editor or IDE takes care of the verboseness issues, leaving just cool and ugly, which really aren't good criteria for picking a language. Java was once cool too, and someday Ruby or whatever the current hotness is will also become uncool.
auganov 15y ago
For me the biggest benefit of a framework is that other people use them. Makes it easier for other people to work on your project with you, reduces the time necessary to adapt. If the turnover of people is huge this benefit can really come in handy. Strange nobody notes that. People that get hurt most are those that believe a framework is a short-cut to learning how to do certain things. You absolutely need to know what's happening under the hood. The benefits to a developer that is working by himself might be very small if there are any. I guess it depends on how high-level we need to go.
cesar 15y ago
I agree that overly generic frameworks are pretty useless, too abstract, complicated, cumbersome and take a lot of effort to use. I know because there are a lot of Java frameworks like that, and I have been using Java for most of my professional career. On the other hand (and I am not trying to defend them), I think that some frameworks really do help you get the job done. I think the advent of open source and open source frameworks has made possible the software industrialization that we are in. Software development has become industrialized, many frameworks have helped us - developers - become more productive. And I think that is a good thing.
trustfundbaby 15y ago
timeless. I still remember reading that when it was first written years ago and being in awe.
JackDanger 15y ago
There's some good stuff here but it's mixed in with some truly sick casual sexism. Unfuckingacceptable.
- knieveltech 15y ago
  What, you prefer formal sexism? (burn karma, burn)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- roel_v 15y ago
  What are you talking about?
sambeau 15y ago
This comment totally missed the point: A good framework is nothing more than your toolbox filled with a good selection of tools. Some tools are very general purpose (standard claw hammer) while others are very specialized (roofing hammer). Having them all available and knowing when to use them is half the battle. No, sir. That is a good library.
- rickmb 15y ago
  No, sir. That is a framework you may not be familiar with. There are frameworks specifically designed to be modular, and of which 90% can be used as a library, without being forced to apply it's MVC or scaffolding bits. The line between framework an library is a blurry one in a world where "framework" does not equal "Rails".
  - techiferous 15y ago
    Framework: it calls you. Library: you call it.
    - jcapote 15y ago
      Well put.
    - biot 15y ago
      BenjiSmith puts it similarly in a comment halfway down: A library is something *contained* within my code. A framework is a *container* for my application.
      - Retric 15y ago
        That distinction only has meaning when passing functions around is hard. Nobody call simple chart generating library's frameworks even if they have large numbers of call backs to your code. At the same time it's easy to find actual web frameworks that are instantiated by your code which may spawn unrelated processes at the same time.
    - 15y ago
schiptsov 15y ago
Framework is a thing that should emerge as a result of your own project long after its launch (after major evolutionary changes/rewrites based on actual usage feedback). It is your team's encoded skills and experience. People who are trying to choice a framework by browsing trough feature lists (not even the code) before they have a working prototype (which means understanding of actual algorithms and data structures) are doomed. ^_^ People who're trying to sell you a piles of code "you really-really need" such as J2EE are just cheaters. btw, no one prevents you from copying the code from any codebase you like, but only if you can read and understand it. My favorite example is libnginx.so - just better APR. ^_^
- praptak 15y ago
  "Framework is a thing that should emerge as a result of your own project long after its launch (after major evolutionary changes/rewrites based on actual usage feedback). It is your team's encoded skills and experience." This, expressed by Martin Fowler: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FoundationFramework.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FoundationFramework.html and http://martinfowler.com/bliki/HarvestedFramework.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/HarvestedFramework.html
erikig 15y ago
That's why I like raw PHP, Python or Perl. In the era of Hammers, Hammer factories and Hammer factory factories, its always convenient to have a nice useful rock.
hakunin 15y ago
I'm going to have a bit of fun here. I have known two types of developers. The ones practicing creation magic and the others, specializing in alteration. When creation mages see a problem, they create a solution. The power of their mind allows them to come up with the exact thing that needs to be created for the given problem. Their creation skills are honed so well that they get incredibly fast. They don't need to look around much since there's no point in paying attention to what they have created before. Their old creations already solved their problems, they work, they don't have to be disturbed again. Of course creation mages are not stupid, they simply tend to focus on a direct path towards a solution. If some mana could be easily saved by using something already created, they certainly wouldn't pass it up. They would reuse what they've already built. There are just way too many things around them, and it's hard to determine if something fits. After all, they have to keep going without delays. A good creation mage has learned to keep things sufficiently neat. They frequently remember things that they could reuse here and there. However, when one observes any such mage at work, one often sees a lot of mess. Some of the mess has occasional patterns, some things are interconnected, but for the most part it's a very complicated and disconnected system of various moving parts working autonomously to solve their individual problems. Alteration mages work a bit differently. They are often slower than creation mages, especially in the beginning. That's because they spend quite a bit of time studying their surroundings. They take longer to solve a problem. The thing about alteration mages is, they can't handle mess. (They are accustomed to altering, not creating.) There is a certain compulsive quality to their mind, they simply can't relax in the presence of something unnecessary, when something could be altered instead. You'd often see such mage cleaning their workspace leaving it neat and stripped to bare minimum. They don't have many things in their possession, but spend a lot of time learning about potential things out there that they _could_ have if they wanted. Alteration requires deep understanding of systems, something that can never be quite mastered due to such huge variety of abstract models. That's why alteration mages grab onto every opportunity to learn about a new sample system, a way things could be arranged, patterns, frameworks. When a problem arises, they don't simply create a solution, they build a system which naturally causes that solution to occur, along with keeping all the existing problems solved. In other words, if plants don't grow, alteration mages would try to augment their biosphere in a way that achieves harmony, while creationists would simply generate some water. Both alteration and creation mages gain experience, level up, and become more valueable. However, they learn slightly different skills. Creation mages learn to have high morale, learn to be calm, and treat solutions as black boxes. They learn to trust their own judgement. Alteration mages on the other hand learn a pretty crappy lesson. They learn that most of their decisions turn out to be incorrect. They build out a system and suddenly get attacked with a problem which the system can't accommodate. It happens once in a while, and they struggle to have everything redesigned from scratch. They end up burnt out, because they can't give up their quest for minimalism and elegance. Yet, it's not all that bad. You see, alteration mages have a very important advantage. They always tend to record their practices and principles. Old and experienced mages would pass on their knowledge to the newbies. The newbies would build upon it to improve elegance of their systems. In essence, an alteration mage is never a lone warrior, they are always standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before them, which is what makes them strong. One of the first things a newbie alteration mage learns is that what they think is right will soon turn out to be wrong. They are too inexperienced to take the multitude of fairly common scenarios into account. At the same time, they quickly learn to be patient. When an elder passes down certain knowledge or framework upon a newbie, it will not be immediately obvious why things have to be the way they are. After some time they finally see that the knowledge of elders has already accounted for so much and in such an elegant manner that they don't need to worry about these problems any longer. They've already been solved by elder alteration mages in the cleanest ways possible, polished by generations of mages that came after them. Some newbies would rebel, against the elders, but only a few lucky ones actually manage to contribute anything useful, albeit this drive of ambition, trial, and error is often what causes major advancements for the whole guild, akin to the evolution process. Eventually, alteration mages manage to outperform their creation colleagues while leaving clean and elegant systems behind. They would sometimes cringe looking at poor creation mages gluing together half-baked solutions to things that are so deeply understood within alteration circles. Their pools of mana are not nearly as deep as of these performant creation wizards, but mana pools are just a small part of their power. Majority of it comes from the knowledge of frameworks. Certainly, if a problem is completely out of ordinary, they may resort to some creation magic, but for the most part you can count on them walking that extra mile towards finding a well-integrated solution.
perfunctory 15y ago
This is one of my most favourite passages on the web.
babel17 15y ago
I think this falls into the category "As simple as possible, but not simpler". Doing abstraction right is a very hard thing indeed and requires the right training and education. None of the creators of the current frameworks have had those, and therefore their creations may be brilliant, but flawed. When an abstraction is done right, you won't feel any pressing need to go beyond it. When it is not done right, you are happy that at least it is "leaky", but calling this leakiness a feature just misses the point in the first place.
- tintin 15y ago
  Totally agree. Some time ago I saw a html template engine with something like this: $framework->outputTextInput("name", "value", "class"); And after running +50 lines of code this would be the output: <input type="text" name="name" value="value" class="class"/> It had nothing to do with keeping the state of the app or something, just outputting HTML...
timinman 15y ago
This is why I prefer Sinatra over Rails.
ChrisArchitect 15y ago
the whole 2005ness of this post, which I just discovered after reading the whole thread here, renders it mostly useless to me. I get what J's saying about the evolution/de-evoluion of frameworks - but wow, in the time since, things have played out differently.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  It's 2011 and I don't see much sanity in the Java projects being churned out by some of my colleagues. What frightens me the most is that they honestly think they are doing it right. They really believe Maven is sane and that Hibernate generates good SQL. Some of them even say "of course we are using Java - what else would we use?"
chucknthem 15y ago
Did anybody else read the factory factory story analogy and thought of the genie/meta genie analogy in Godel Escher Back?
dang 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20180927070411/http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431 http://web.archive.org/web/20180927070411/http://discuss.joe...

199 points by gavingmiller 15y ago

The problem here is that frameworks all operate on different levels, with differing amounts of abstraction, and at some point, you do want that generic, powerful functionality. To perhaps extend the metaphor, if I want to build a spice rack, I don't want to go out into the forest, determine which kind of tree will produce the correct kind of wood, cut it down, trim and plane my planks, and all the other steps which are entailed by wood acquisition. I just want to go to my local hardware/home improvement store and request precut wood. This poster has gone ahead and made assumptions about the nature of resource acquisition which massively simplified his workload and which people normally take for granted in modern life, and as a result, his spice rack will get assembled much quicker. I'm choosing the networking stack as a reasonable example of a framework niche which generally fulfills people's needs without getting in the way and causing the problems he's talking about. Node, Event Machine, Twisted, MINA, etc.

anrope 15y ago
Good point about there being different levels of frameworks/tools. What's important is using the right tools for the job. Sometimes you might need the high level, very abstract framework, but it's not cool if that ends up being the only tool available.

m3thos 15y ago

classical argument of frameworks vs libraries.

salsakran 15y ago

I think it's hard to appreciate the post if you haven't worked in J2EE land back in that era (2005). Just reading that gave me bad flashbacks. "Frameworks", especially on the webstack side of things have gotten a lot saner over the years. I imagine if he had seen something like Play!, he'd have a very different opinion.

abrimo 15y ago
Yea, I was researching frameworks for our software (https://mijura.com https://mijura.com) and I had all but given up on Java until I found play framework. It's like Ruby on Rails meets Java, very well designed and the views are in Groovy. It's also under active development and the community is quite strong.
kaffiene 15y ago
What I find frustrating is the pervading opinion that all of Java = 2005 era J2EE

jowiar 15y ago

What was the state of "frameworks" in 2005, particularly in Java-land. Struts? Spring? Anything that didn't make you want to gouge your eyes out? Even outside of Java-land, Rails had yet to hit 1.0, and Django was just starting. The evolution of the framework has come a long way in 6 years, and frameworks have become less "one size fits all" and more task-appropriate. I think a more appropriate title for this post is: "Why I Hate circa-2005 Java Frameworks"

mechanical_fish 15y ago
A "2005" in the title would be good. Then I would know that I needn't rush to read this, as I read it in the original.
lr 15y ago
WebObjects was in its prime in 2005, and ran circles around everything out there (Java or not). Even in it's completely unsupported (by Apple) state today, it probably still runs circles around most of the frameworks.
harisenbon 15y ago
Knowing this was from 2005 would have been helpful. Having the date be written at the very bottom of the article didn't make things any better. While many of his points are valid, his comparison of carpentry to using a framework takes a very select view of what goes into building something. Of course you need a hammer to build a house, just like you need an if-else statement to build a webpage. If you're building a 10 page webapp (spicerack ) you probably don't need a framework. If you're building a full-fledged web-system (house) you don't need a framework, but you'll be much more productive for having one.
- yxhuvud 15y ago
  Need a framework? Perhaps not, but I'd still use Sinatra for problems of that size since it helps keeping simple things simple.
deepGem 15y ago
Yep, 2005 was the era of Spring and Struts 1.0. Now, if that was not enough, someone in our project had built wrappers around Spring !!!. Key requirement for reading through that code - a bottle of scotch.

dools 15y ago

The most important statement in this article is near the beginning, and it's still relevant today: "I've done small woodworking projects before, and I think I have a pretty good idea of what I need: some wood and a few basic tools: a tape measure, a saw, a level, and a hammer." The reason I hate frameworks (even things like Django which is very easy to get started with) is that, at some point, I'm asked to re-learn a different way of solving a problem that I've already solved in the past. I've been doing lots of thinking about this having written the Great American PHP Framework myself, and worked with other people's frameworks, and also worked a lot in the CMS space and the biggest conclusion that I've come to is that the best tools are those that enable you to do things faster or more conveniently but don't actually provide any abstraction. For example, when deploying a website there are any number of tools to "abstract away" the HTML layer - templating engines, markups, markdowns etc. etc. but the best way to build HTML is using HTML and testing in a web browser, always. When you need to write some code in whatever web framework you're using to handle a POST request, you want to be as close as possible to the HTTP layer without a bunch of arcane systems in between you and what you and the underlying technology. Sure it's handy to have tools which automate some repetitive aspects, but if you understand the underlying principles and you know the syntax of the language you're working with, you should at all times be able to just "get it done" however you know how without reading endless documentation and shoehorning your knowledge through a bunch of layers of abstraction. The same goes for ORM - I want convenience of access to my data, and some automation to handle some of the more boring aspects of writing SQL, but I need to be able to mix and match (yes I know most ORMs allow you to use raw SQL, but it's always one or the other - the ORM or the SQL - I've never used a tool that has a simple method for me to extend the ORM bits halfway through the query building process with some custom SQL). This is my zeitgeist now and it pervades all the projects I'm working on. [1] http://www.decalcms.com/ http://www.decalcms.com/

Spyro7 15y ago
"I've never used a tool that has a simple method for me to extend the ORM bits halfway through the query building process with some custom SQL" Well, I am not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but Django's ORM allows you to write custom SQL and then collect the resulting rows as objects. You can also circumvent the object layer entirely and deal directly with the SQL. Take a look at this page: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/sql/ https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/sql/ I have found this functionality to be incredibly valuable for quite a few of the projects that I have worked on.

Volpe 15y ago

"I'm currently in the planning stages of building a hosted Java web application..." Seriously, people are starting NEW projects with Java as the language of choice? Despite the plethora of 'better' languages you can run on a JVM.

rjd 15y ago
I sugest reading the article and don't take thigns out of context. - First it's from 2005 (when was Java made open source.. 2006?). I'm no expert in the JVM but I guess any signifcant community gains where made after 2006. - Secondly he makes it perfectly clear he no choice "yes, it has to be Java, for a variety of reasons that I don't feel like going into right now" That aside many people still choose Java for various reasons over other languages. Hell I'm still doing .net 1.1 and VB6 work for clients.
watchandwait 15y ago
Article is from 2005. I do think the framework situation has improved a lot since then.
icebraining 15y ago
I am. I'm building it as something to show to prospective employers and Java is still the de-facto language 'round here. I'll probably rewrite a good part in Scala, though, after I finish the first version.
ecopoesis 15y ago
Why the hate on Java? Sure it's not sexy, but: 1) Almost everyone knows it so hiring is easy. 2) There's a very large community that supports its tools, infrastructure and libraries. 3) It's faster then almost anything else out there. 4) It has migration routes (via Scala or Clojure) to sexier languages. As far as I can tell, the only drawbacks to Java are that it's not cool, that's it's verbose and that's it's ugly. Any half decent editor or IDE takes care of the verboseness issues, leaving just cool and ugly, which really aren't good criteria for picking a language. Java was once cool too, and someday Ruby or whatever the current hotness is will also become uncool.

auganov 15y ago

For me the biggest benefit of a framework is that other people use them. Makes it easier for other people to work on your project with you, reduces the time necessary to adapt. If the turnover of people is huge this benefit can really come in handy. Strange nobody notes that. People that get hurt most are those that believe a framework is a short-cut to learning how to do certain things. You absolutely need to know what's happening under the hood. The benefits to a developer that is working by himself might be very small if there are any. I guess it depends on how high-level we need to go.

cesar 15y ago

I agree that overly generic frameworks are pretty useless, too abstract, complicated, cumbersome and take a lot of effort to use. I know because there are a lot of Java frameworks like that, and I have been using Java for most of my professional career. On the other hand (and I am not trying to defend them), I think that some frameworks really do help you get the job done. I think the advent of open source and open source frameworks has made possible the software industrialization that we are in. Software development has become industrialized, many frameworks have helped us - developers - become more productive. And I think that is a good thing.

trustfundbaby 15y ago

timeless. I still remember reading that when it was first written years ago and being in awe.

JackDanger 15y ago

There's some good stuff here but it's mixed in with some truly sick casual sexism. Unfuckingacceptable.

knieveltech 15y ago
What, you prefer formal sexism? (burn karma, burn)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
roel_v 15y ago
What are you talking about?

sambeau 15y ago

This comment totally missed the point: A good framework is nothing more than your toolbox filled with a good selection of tools. Some tools are very general purpose (standard claw hammer) while others are very specialized (roofing hammer). Having them all available and knowing when to use them is half the battle. No, sir. That is a good library.

rickmb 15y ago
No, sir. That is a framework you may not be familiar with. There are frameworks specifically designed to be modular, and of which 90% can be used as a library, without being forced to apply it's MVC or scaffolding bits. The line between framework an library is a blurry one in a world where "framework" does not equal "Rails".
- techiferous 15y ago
  Framework: it calls you. Library: you call it.
  - jcapote 15y ago
    Well put.
  - biot 15y ago
    BenjiSmith puts it similarly in a comment halfway down: A library is something *contained* within my code. A framework is a *container* for my application.
    - Retric 15y ago
      That distinction only has meaning when passing functions around is hard. Nobody call simple chart generating library's frameworks even if they have large numbers of call backs to your code. At the same time it's easy to find actual web frameworks that are instantiated by your code which may spawn unrelated processes at the same time.
  - 15y ago

schiptsov 15y ago

Framework is a thing that should emerge as a result of your own project long after its launch (after major evolutionary changes/rewrites based on actual usage feedback). It is your team's encoded skills and experience. People who are trying to choice a framework by browsing trough feature lists (not even the code) before they have a working prototype (which means understanding of actual algorithms and data structures) are doomed. ^_^ People who're trying to sell you a piles of code "you really-really need" such as J2EE are just cheaters. btw, no one prevents you from copying the code from any codebase you like, but only if you can read and understand it. My favorite example is libnginx.so - just better APR. ^_^

praptak 15y ago
"Framework is a thing that should emerge as a result of your own project long after its launch (after major evolutionary changes/rewrites based on actual usage feedback). It is your team's encoded skills and experience." This, expressed by Martin Fowler: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FoundationFramework.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FoundationFramework.html and http://martinfowler.com/bliki/HarvestedFramework.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/HarvestedFramework.html

erikig 15y ago

That's why I like raw PHP, Python or Perl. In the era of Hammers, Hammer factories and Hammer factory factories, its always convenient to have a nice useful rock.

hakunin 15y ago

I'm going to have a bit of fun here. I have known two types of developers. The ones practicing creation magic and the others, specializing in alteration. When creation mages see a problem, they create a solution. The power of their mind allows them to come up with the exact thing that needs to be created for the given problem. Their creation skills are honed so well that they get incredibly fast. They don't need to look around much since there's no point in paying attention to what they have created before. Their old creations already solved their problems, they work, they don't have to be disturbed again. Of course creation mages are not stupid, they simply tend to focus on a direct path towards a solution. If some mana could be easily saved by using something already created, they certainly wouldn't pass it up. They would reuse what they've already built. There are just way too many things around them, and it's hard to determine if something fits. After all, they have to keep going without delays. A good creation mage has learned to keep things sufficiently neat. They frequently remember things that they could reuse here and there. However, when one observes any such mage at work, one often sees a lot of mess. Some of the mess has occasional patterns, some things are interconnected, but for the most part it's a very complicated and disconnected system of various moving parts working autonomously to solve their individual problems. Alteration mages work a bit differently. They are often slower than creation mages, especially in the beginning. That's because they spend quite a bit of time studying their surroundings. They take longer to solve a problem. The thing about alteration mages is, they can't handle mess. (They are accustomed to altering, not creating.) There is a certain compulsive quality to their mind, they simply can't relax in the presence of something unnecessary, when something could be altered instead. You'd often see such mage cleaning their workspace leaving it neat and stripped to bare minimum. They don't have many things in their possession, but spend a lot of time learning about potential things out there that they _could_ have if they wanted. Alteration requires deep understanding of systems, something that can never be quite mastered due to such huge variety of abstract models. That's why alteration mages grab onto every opportunity to learn about a new sample system, a way things could be arranged, patterns, frameworks. When a problem arises, they don't simply create a solution, they build a system which naturally causes that solution to occur, along with keeping all the existing problems solved. In other words, if plants don't grow, alteration mages would try to augment their biosphere in a way that achieves harmony, while creationists would simply generate some water. Both alteration and creation mages gain experience, level up, and become more valueable. However, they learn slightly different skills. Creation mages learn to have high morale, learn to be calm, and treat solutions as black boxes. They learn to trust their own judgement. Alteration mages on the other hand learn a pretty crappy lesson. They learn that most of their decisions turn out to be incorrect. They build out a system and suddenly get attacked with a problem which the system can't accommodate. It happens once in a while, and they struggle to have everything redesigned from scratch. They end up burnt out, because they can't give up their quest for minimalism and elegance. Yet, it's not all that bad. You see, alteration mages have a very important advantage. They always tend to record their practices and principles. Old and experienced mages would pass on their knowledge to the newbies. The newbies would build upon it to improve elegance of their systems. In essence, an alteration mage is never a lone warrior, they are always standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before them, which is what makes them strong. One of the first things a newbie alteration mage learns is that what they think is right will soon turn out to be wrong. They are too inexperienced to take the multitude of fairly common scenarios into account. At the same time, they quickly learn to be patient. When an elder passes down certain knowledge or framework upon a newbie, it will not be immediately obvious why things have to be the way they are. After some time they finally see that the knowledge of elders has already accounted for so much and in such an elegant manner that they don't need to worry about these problems any longer. They've already been solved by elder alteration mages in the cleanest ways possible, polished by generations of mages that came after them. Some newbies would rebel, against the elders, but only a few lucky ones actually manage to contribute anything useful, albeit this drive of ambition, trial, and error is often what causes major advancements for the whole guild, akin to the evolution process. Eventually, alteration mages manage to outperform their creation colleagues while leaving clean and elegant systems behind. They would sometimes cringe looking at poor creation mages gluing together half-baked solutions to things that are so deeply understood within alteration circles. Their pools of mana are not nearly as deep as of these performant creation wizards, but mana pools are just a small part of their power. Majority of it comes from the knowledge of frameworks. Certainly, if a problem is completely out of ordinary, they may resort to some creation magic, but for the most part you can count on them walking that extra mile towards finding a well-integrated solution.

perfunctory 15y ago

This is one of my most favourite passages on the web.

babel17 15y ago

I think this falls into the category "As simple as possible, but not simpler". Doing abstraction right is a very hard thing indeed and requires the right training and education. None of the creators of the current frameworks have had those, and therefore their creations may be brilliant, but flawed. When an abstraction is done right, you won't feel any pressing need to go beyond it. When it is not done right, you are happy that at least it is "leaky", but calling this leakiness a feature just misses the point in the first place.

tintin 15y ago
Totally agree. Some time ago I saw a html template engine with something like this: $framework->outputTextInput("name", "value", "class"); And after running +50 lines of code this would be the output: <input type="text" name="name" value="value" class="class"/> It had nothing to do with keeping the state of the app or something, just outputting HTML...

timinman 15y ago

This is why I prefer Sinatra over Rails.

ChrisArchitect 15y ago

the whole 2005ness of this post, which I just discovered after reading the whole thread here, renders it mostly useless to me. I get what J's saying about the evolution/de-evoluion of frameworks - but wow, in the time since, things have played out differently.

rbanffy 15y ago
It's 2011 and I don't see much sanity in the Java projects being churned out by some of my colleagues. What frightens me the most is that they honestly think they are doing it right. They really believe Maven is sane and that Hibernate generates good SQL. Some of them even say "of course we are using Java - what else would we use?"

chucknthem 15y ago

Did anybody else read the factory factory story analogy and thought of the genie/meta genie analogy in Godel Escher Back?

dang 3y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20180927070411/http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431 http://web.archive.org/web/20180927070411/http://discuss.joe...