Ask HN: Web frameworks – which less popular frameworks are you using and why?

Many popular programming languages today have one or two web frameworks that dominate usage in that language over other web frameworks for the same language.

- Python: Django, Flask

- Ruby: Ruby on Rails (RoR)

- PHP: Laravel

- JavaScript: ReactJS

I think it's nice to hear are about lesser-known web frameworks not often in the spotlight. If you are using a lesser-known or less popular web framework, what made you choose the framework? What do you like (or dislike) about the web framework you use?

We use prime-mvc, a lightweight Java MVC framework: https://github.com/prime-framework/

I think this framework grew out of the initial development team's needs for a fast, lightweight Java framework. (I wasn't there, not sure how much looking around they did, but this was years and years ago.) It's now foundational for our applications.

We've had some folks at the Boulder Ruby meetup present on Hanami, which appears to have better separation of concerns and testability as well as less magic than ruby on rails. Hard to compete with the ecosystem, though.

For Kotlin, there's http4k. It just gets out of your way.

PHP: CakePHP

This was the very first framework I learned when I first learned PHP, and it has always just been so incredibly _easy_ to accomplish most common MVC tasks that I've stuck with it. I've become quite the expert in the framework over the years, even managing to make it bend quirky ways that it was not meant to in service of business goals. That has made me an extremely valuable resource for companies using the framework, and so I keep using it. Plus, I enjoy it immensely.

PHP: usually you only need routing, not the whole kitchen sink; check out slim.