9 ms·

List of minimalist frameworks

126 points by neiesc 13y ago

A list of minimalist frameworks(simple and lightweight).

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
_neil 13y ago
I hadn't heard of Cuba before. Grape[1] would also be worth listing in the Ruby section. It's an actively maintained microframework for REST APIs. [1] https://github.com/intridea/grape https://github.com/intridea/grape
- jamese 13y ago
  Scorched may also be nice to add. https://github.com/Wardrop/Scorched https://github.com/Wardrop/Scorched
  - biftek 13y ago
    Don't forget Camping! https://github.com/camping/camping https://github.com/camping/camping
    - roberthahn 13y ago
      One of my favourite frameworks! I abandoned Rails for Camping when I saw how easily I could grok the entire framework. One thing I liked doing when building web apps was to rip out the View infrastructure so that I could more easily render alternative formats. I've written a couple of articles on Camping here [1], [2] that people might be interested in (be gentle, my writing wasn't as good 6 years ago) [1] http://roberthahn.ca/articles/2007/07/23/three-methods-for-simulating-render_component-in-camping/ http://roberthahn.ca/articles/2007/07/23/three-methods-for-s... 3 methods for simulating render_component in Camping [2] http://roberthahn.ca/articles/2007/07/22/camping-without-the-view/ http://roberthahn.ca/articles/2007/07/22/camping-without-the... Camping without the View
- xs_kid 13y ago
  Found this nice Sinatra micro-clone thanks to the page: https://github.com/guilleiguaran/nancy https://github.com/guilleiguaran/nancy
  - tiedemann 13y ago
    There's also the Nancy lightweight web framework for .NET https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy http://nancyfx.org/ http://nancyfx.org/
AndyKelley 13y ago
Isn't "minimalist framework" a contradiction? It seems like if you were going for minimalism you would not use a framework.
- krapp 13y ago
  Not necessarily. It's minimalism in terms of a framework (though in more objective terms I guess you would be right.) To me that means having not much more than a url router and a way to do MVC - no asset management, no HTML helpers, no ORM, no default templating language. I'm surprised Slim Framework isn't listed under PHP though, is that not considered minimalist?
  - rmrfrmrf 13y ago
    > no HTML helpers, [...] no default templating language Flask has HTML helpers and uses Jinja2 as its template language, though...
    - krapp 13y ago
      Hm... well maybe my definition of 'minimal' is a bit more minimal than the norm then.
    - ssijak 13y ago
      But you can pip install any other templating language and use it in flask. jinja is just the default.
- huckyaus 13y ago
  I read 'minimalist framework' as being a framework that is minimalist, as opposed to a framework for people that are building minimalist software.
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  I agree. Having just finished a project with Flask, I ended up using no less than 8 million dependencies that I'd never heard of. "BYO everything" frameworks would be more appropriate, but even then, Flask brings with it an entire basement of sub-frameworks that I would argue make it so that you might as well just use a full-fledged framework like Django.
secoif 13y ago
@neiesc please make this a wiki instead of a readme. Edit wiki much more conducive to contribution than fork + PR + wait + hope
- josegonzalez 13y ago
  You can edit a markdown page direct from github.
  - cmelbye 13y ago
    That's the "Fork" step he mentioned. The "Edit" button on GitHub automatically forks the project and dumps you into the Markdown editor. The rest of the steps are still required to get changes merged into a file.
- mkesper 13y ago
  A-Z sorting is pretty much useless for something like this. Sorting by quality of documentation would be nice.
dep_b 13y ago
I really liked Slim. It just wasn't convoluted or giving an improvised feel like Laravel or WordPress and many other PHP frameworks.
- girvo 13y ago
  I use Slim, Idiorm, and PHPUnit to build all my projects :)
jamesbritt 13y ago
Quite sparse for Ruby. I'm surprised Innate and Ramaze are not listed, for example.
quim05 13y ago
"Minimalist framework" is an oxymoron.
karolisd 13y ago
https://github.com/aemkei/fishbone.js/ https://github.com/aemkei/fishbone.js/ - A super lightweight (½kb) JavaScript library with automatic method chaining, automatic context binding, event support and simple inheritance. c-{{{-<
euphemize 13y ago
Missing quite a lot of PHP ones. For instance, tinyMVC is great if you want to learn how MVC works with PHP.
- girvo 13y ago
  Hah, I wrote an ActiveRecord plugin or TinyMVC back in the day. Should be in the forums still. Nostalgia!
monksy 13y ago
It appears that the focus of this was web frameworks.. but I think that Java microframeworks should be added here. I created a pull request for that.
- ds_ 13y ago
  I have to agree with RyanZAG, log4j seems a strange inclusion in this list.
sunny1304 13y ago
i dont think you can call Pardino a minimalist framework.
- xs_kid 13y ago
  agree padrino is pretty near to Rails, what's the criteria used to determine if a framework is minimalist or not?
  - al2o3cr 13y ago
    From what I can tell, "minimal" == "makes code hipsters' pants tight". YMMV.
- Argorak 13y ago
  Ex-Padrino maintainer here. I would agree - to an extent. Padrinos goal is to not be in the way of integrating minimalist libraries and it is composed of a set of Sinatra plugins that are minimalist as well. So, it breathes the mindset, but yeah, it is a stack.
manuelflara 13y ago
Unsurprisingly (I think only a few dozen people know about it), the PHP framework I use isn't there: http://sifo.me http://sifo.me It's a framework created by a friend of mine and it's used in quite a few actual businesses (including my own). I can't say I've looked around much in the PHP framework landscape in the last few years, so can't compare, but I'm really happy with it. Simple, flexible and powerful.
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  First sentence on the homepage: "Sifo is a well-proben [sic] open source framework for PHP professionals."
  - manuelflara 13y ago
    Will pass it along, thanks. Neither of us are native English speakers.
lkrubner 13y ago
I know this issue has been brought up many times before, but to some extent the existence of a framework suggests a lack of composability in the language being discussed. This gets discussed a lot in the context of Clojure, where people new to Clojure often ask, "Where are the frameworks?" The more meta-programming that a language allows, the more its functions will tend to be composable. The more composable it is, the more its libraries can be tied together without the need for an over-arching framework. The framework is there to provide needed cohesion at exactly those points where the language itself does not provide enough meta reflexion to enable fearless mixing of libraries that have little knowledge of each other. There is also the historical trend toward lighter frameworks: Rails was lighter than Struts, and more recently we've seen a flood of frameworks that are much lighter than Rails. The Clojure eco-system has gone furthest down this road. Although at first there was a feeling that there should be a web framework for Clojure (and people made wonderful efforts with Noir) eventually the consensus of the community was that it was sufficient to get by with various libraries, some of which (Ring) have become standards. We see this with a lot of new Ruby frameworks as well: composability over centralized organization. Javascript is going down this road as well. Languages that offer less in the way of meta-programming (PHP) have been slower to go down this road. No matter what language you use, the future direction of the trend seems clear enough: less frameworks, less centralized effort toward organization, more emphasis on composability, better ability to mix libraries for maximum effect.
- girvo 13y ago
  Surprisingly PHP with Composer, coupled with type hinting and interfaces allows you to achieve what you're discussing. It's how I write web apps now -- small libraries, classes that expect interfaces, and unit testing. It's great - no frameworks!
- secoif 13y ago
  A fantastic example of this (in javascript) is trending right now on hackernews – myth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6923141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6923141 Look at this implementation: it's just a composition of a bunch of other libraries. no logic at all. This is how it should be: https://github.com/segmentio/myth/blob/master/index.js#L37-L45 https://github.com/segmentio/myth/blob/master/index.js#L37-L...
aheilbut 13y ago
CherryPy doesn't get enough love.
owenversteeg 13y ago
Ooh yay! My CSS framework Min is the smallest of them all! http://minfwk.com http://minfwk.com
granttimmerman 13y ago
Number of minimalist frameworks for Java: 1
- ds_ 13y ago
  And I don't think even that really belongs in this list.
- bodiam 13y ago
  Thats because at least Vert.x, Ratpack and Spark are missing.
stickhandle 13y ago
Spark (http://www.sparkjava.com/ http://www.sparkjava.com/) is the java sinatra
- kitd 13y ago
  See also Google SiteBricks http://sitebricks.org/#home http://sitebricks.org/#home
stephanos2k 13y ago
Why is no framework for Go in the list? Oh, that's right: They are all minimalistic ;)
RyanZAG 13y ago
What is Log4J doing there? It's an incredibly complex framework for doing something incredibly simple - logging. It's the exact opposite of a minimalist framework.
- jeltz 13y ago
  Yeah, I still wonder if it is a joke inclusion or not. Log4j is probably larger than all other frameworks on that page, and it just handles logging.
_ak 13y ago
Shameless plug: https://github.com/akrennmair/metoo-pm https://github.com/akrennmair/metoo-pm
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mimog 13y ago
This list is a lot more extensive for javascript: http://microjs.com/# http://microjs.com/#
CmonDev 13y ago
http://programmingisterrible.com/post/65781074112/devils-dictionary-of-programming http://programmingisterrible.com/post/65781074112/devils-dic... "lightweight — I don’t understand the use-cases the alternatives solve." "minimal — You’re going to have to write more code than I did to make it useful." "simple — It solves my use case."
ErikAugust 13y ago
For PHP - Silex is really awesome. You get the minimal app controller/router similar to Express. And you can pick and choose Symfony2 (and other) components to add. It makes putting together an API for your front-end a snap. For those interested in this approach, I've put together a boilerplate called PHANG that combines Silex and AngularJS: https://github.com/ErikAugust/phang https://github.com/ErikAugust/phang

126 points by neiesc 13y ago

A list of minimalist frameworks(simple and lightweight).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

_neil 13y ago

I hadn't heard of Cuba before. Grape[1] would also be worth listing in the Ruby section. It's an actively maintained microframework for REST APIs. [1] https://github.com/intridea/grape https://github.com/intridea/grape

jamese 13y ago
Scorched may also be nice to add. https://github.com/Wardrop/Scorched https://github.com/Wardrop/Scorched
- biftek 13y ago
  Don't forget Camping! https://github.com/camping/camping https://github.com/camping/camping
  - roberthahn 13y ago
    One of my favourite frameworks! I abandoned Rails for Camping when I saw how easily I could grok the entire framework. One thing I liked doing when building web apps was to rip out the View infrastructure so that I could more easily render alternative formats. I've written a couple of articles on Camping here [1], [2] that people might be interested in (be gentle, my writing wasn't as good 6 years ago) [1] http://roberthahn.ca/articles/2007/07/23/three-methods-for-simulating-render_component-in-camping/ http://roberthahn.ca/articles/2007/07/23/three-methods-for-s... 3 methods for simulating render_component in Camping [2] http://roberthahn.ca/articles/2007/07/22/camping-without-the-view/ http://roberthahn.ca/articles/2007/07/22/camping-without-the... Camping without the View
xs_kid 13y ago
Found this nice Sinatra micro-clone thanks to the page: https://github.com/guilleiguaran/nancy https://github.com/guilleiguaran/nancy
- tiedemann 13y ago
  There's also the Nancy lightweight web framework for .NET https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy http://nancyfx.org/ http://nancyfx.org/

AndyKelley 13y ago

Isn't "minimalist framework" a contradiction? It seems like if you were going for minimalism you would not use a framework.

krapp 13y ago
Not necessarily. It's minimalism in terms of a framework (though in more objective terms I guess you would be right.) To me that means having not much more than a url router and a way to do MVC - no asset management, no HTML helpers, no ORM, no default templating language. I'm surprised Slim Framework isn't listed under PHP though, is that not considered minimalist?
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  > no HTML helpers, [...] no default templating language Flask has HTML helpers and uses Jinja2 as its template language, though...
  - krapp 13y ago
    Hm... well maybe my definition of 'minimal' is a bit more minimal than the norm then.
  - ssijak 13y ago
    But you can pip install any other templating language and use it in flask. jinja is just the default.
huckyaus 13y ago
I read 'minimalist framework' as being a framework that is minimalist, as opposed to a framework for people that are building minimalist software.
rmrfrmrf 13y ago
I agree. Having just finished a project with Flask, I ended up using no less than 8 million dependencies that I'd never heard of. "BYO everything" frameworks would be more appropriate, but even then, Flask brings with it an entire basement of sub-frameworks that I would argue make it so that you might as well just use a full-fledged framework like Django.

secoif 13y ago

@neiesc please make this a wiki instead of a readme. Edit wiki much more conducive to contribution than fork + PR + wait + hope

josegonzalez 13y ago
You can edit a markdown page direct from github.
- cmelbye 13y ago
  That's the "Fork" step he mentioned. The "Edit" button on GitHub automatically forks the project and dumps you into the Markdown editor. The rest of the steps are still required to get changes merged into a file.
mkesper 13y ago
A-Z sorting is pretty much useless for something like this. Sorting by quality of documentation would be nice.

dep_b 13y ago

I really liked Slim. It just wasn't convoluted or giving an improvised feel like Laravel or WordPress and many other PHP frameworks.

girvo 13y ago
I use Slim, Idiorm, and PHPUnit to build all my projects :)

jamesbritt 13y ago

Quite sparse for Ruby. I'm surprised Innate and Ramaze are not listed, for example.

quim05 13y ago

"Minimalist framework" is an oxymoron.

karolisd 13y ago

https://github.com/aemkei/fishbone.js/ https://github.com/aemkei/fishbone.js/ - A super lightweight (½kb) JavaScript library with automatic method chaining, automatic context binding, event support and simple inheritance. c-{{{-<

euphemize 13y ago

Missing quite a lot of PHP ones. For instance, tinyMVC is great if you want to learn how MVC works with PHP.

girvo 13y ago
Hah, I wrote an ActiveRecord plugin or TinyMVC back in the day. Should be in the forums still. Nostalgia!

monksy 13y ago

It appears that the focus of this was web frameworks.. but I think that Java microframeworks should be added here. I created a pull request for that.

ds_ 13y ago
I have to agree with RyanZAG, log4j seems a strange inclusion in this list.

sunny1304 13y ago

i dont think you can call Pardino a minimalist framework.

xs_kid 13y ago
agree padrino is pretty near to Rails, what's the criteria used to determine if a framework is minimalist or not?
- al2o3cr 13y ago
  From what I can tell, "minimal" == "makes code hipsters' pants tight". YMMV.
Argorak 13y ago
Ex-Padrino maintainer here. I would agree - to an extent. Padrinos goal is to not be in the way of integrating minimalist libraries and it is composed of a set of Sinatra plugins that are minimalist as well. So, it breathes the mindset, but yeah, it is a stack.

manuelflara 13y ago

Unsurprisingly (I think only a few dozen people know about it), the PHP framework I use isn't there: http://sifo.me http://sifo.me It's a framework created by a friend of mine and it's used in quite a few actual businesses (including my own). I can't say I've looked around much in the PHP framework landscape in the last few years, so can't compare, but I'm really happy with it. Simple, flexible and powerful.

rmrfrmrf 13y ago
First sentence on the homepage: "Sifo is a well-proben [sic] open source framework for PHP professionals."
- manuelflara 13y ago
  Will pass it along, thanks. Neither of us are native English speakers.

lkrubner 13y ago

I know this issue has been brought up many times before, but to some extent the existence of a framework suggests a lack of composability in the language being discussed. This gets discussed a lot in the context of Clojure, where people new to Clojure often ask, "Where are the frameworks?" The more meta-programming that a language allows, the more its functions will tend to be composable. The more composable it is, the more its libraries can be tied together without the need for an over-arching framework. The framework is there to provide needed cohesion at exactly those points where the language itself does not provide enough meta reflexion to enable fearless mixing of libraries that have little knowledge of each other. There is also the historical trend toward lighter frameworks: Rails was lighter than Struts, and more recently we've seen a flood of frameworks that are much lighter than Rails. The Clojure eco-system has gone furthest down this road. Although at first there was a feeling that there should be a web framework for Clojure (and people made wonderful efforts with Noir) eventually the consensus of the community was that it was sufficient to get by with various libraries, some of which (Ring) have become standards. We see this with a lot of new Ruby frameworks as well: composability over centralized organization. Javascript is going down this road as well. Languages that offer less in the way of meta-programming (PHP) have been slower to go down this road. No matter what language you use, the future direction of the trend seems clear enough: less frameworks, less centralized effort toward organization, more emphasis on composability, better ability to mix libraries for maximum effect.

girvo 13y ago
Surprisingly PHP with Composer, coupled with type hinting and interfaces allows you to achieve what you're discussing. It's how I write web apps now -- small libraries, classes that expect interfaces, and unit testing. It's great - no frameworks!
secoif 13y ago
A fantastic example of this (in javascript) is trending right now on hackernews – myth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6923141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6923141 Look at this implementation: it's just a composition of a bunch of other libraries. no logic at all. This is how it should be: https://github.com/segmentio/myth/blob/master/index.js#L37-L45 https://github.com/segmentio/myth/blob/master/index.js#L37-L...

aheilbut 13y ago

CherryPy doesn't get enough love.

owenversteeg 13y ago

Ooh yay! My CSS framework Min is the smallest of them all! http://minfwk.com http://minfwk.com

granttimmerman 13y ago

Number of minimalist frameworks for Java: 1

ds_ 13y ago
And I don't think even that really belongs in this list.
bodiam 13y ago
Thats because at least Vert.x, Ratpack and Spark are missing.

stickhandle 13y ago

Spark (http://www.sparkjava.com/ http://www.sparkjava.com/) is the java sinatra

kitd 13y ago
See also Google SiteBricks http://sitebricks.org/#home http://sitebricks.org/#home

stephanos2k 13y ago

Why is no framework for Go in the list? Oh, that's right: They are all minimalistic ;)

RyanZAG 13y ago

What is Log4J doing there? It's an incredibly complex framework for doing something incredibly simple - logging. It's the exact opposite of a minimalist framework.

jeltz 13y ago
Yeah, I still wonder if it is a joke inclusion or not. Log4j is probably larger than all other frameworks on that page, and it just handles logging.

_ak 13y ago

Shameless plug: https://github.com/akrennmair/metoo-pm https://github.com/akrennmair/metoo-pm

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

mimog 13y ago

This list is a lot more extensive for javascript: http://microjs.com/# http://microjs.com/#

CmonDev 13y ago

http://programmingisterrible.com/post/65781074112/devils-dictionary-of-programming http://programmingisterrible.com/post/65781074112/devils-dic... "lightweight — I don’t understand the use-cases the alternatives solve." "minimal — You’re going to have to write more code than I did to make it useful." "simple — It solves my use case."

ErikAugust 13y ago

For PHP - Silex is really awesome. You get the minimal app controller/router similar to Express. And you can pick and choose Symfony2 (and other) components to add. It makes putting together an API for your front-end a snap. For those interested in this approach, I've put together a boilerplate called PHANG that combines Silex and AngularJS: https://github.com/ErikAugust/phang https://github.com/ErikAugust/phang