It's a philosophical thing. The advantages of microframeworks (e.g. Sinatra, Flask, Javelin, etc) are that as your needs expand, you can bolt-on the additional

It's a philosophical thing. The advantages of microframeworks (e.g. Sinatra, Flask, Javelin, etc) are that as your needs expand, you can bolt-on the additional functionality as you see fit, from a "best of breed" selection of your favorite libraries. The advantages of batteries-included frameworks (e.g. Rails, Django, Spring, etc) are that your application is easier to find people to work on, and has a greater change of remaining coherent and maintainable for longer. In the real world with microframeworks, some rock star starts a greenfield project, and has a delightful fun time selecting their personal picks of various community libraries to bolt functionality on top of the microframework. Then that original developer moves on 6 months later. The best-case scenario is that half of their pet community libraries are no longer being maintained 12 months after that, and the team has to constantly sink time into migrating pieces of the app to other actively maintained libraries. The worst-case scenerio is that you get the next-generation rock star, who wastes time ripping out pieces for no real reason other than using their own personal pet favorites. In my experience, the microframeworks are ideal for apps where you can be fairly confident that the scope will never expand (e.g. simple Lambda functions). Otherwise, they're popular toys for startups, and nooks and crannies of large enterprises where no one's really providing any oversight over the juniors.