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Choosing a Web Framework/Language Combo for the Next Decade

jacquesmattheij.com

11–20 of 228 posts

Re: Choosing a Web Framework/Language Combo for the Next Decade

#11
post #9
post #5

I love Kohana (for a PHP framework) ... too bad it's no longer being developed.

Thank you for saving me some time. I missed that and thought Kohana was still being supported, but I just checked and found this: http://forum.kohanaframework.org/discussion/12509/final-rele... So you are absolutely right. Will drop it from the list to try and will update the article.

No problem, looking forward to the verdict. :)

Re: Choosing a Web Framework/Language Combo for the Next Decade

#12
post #10

I'm also a bit frustrated with the Yii situation, although I do understand why they're doing it. Yii 2.0 is a total rewrite, and it is technically very impressive. However they have had the disadvantage of not being able to ship until it reaches feature parity with 1.1 which has been a huge undertaking. The lead developer, Qiang, is literally the second most active developer on github[0], so it's not like they're not…

Qiang being so much of the driving force behind Yii is actually a strike against Yii. It would be much better if that load were spread out more, even if that probably would delay a release. SPOFs are not good.

Re: Choosing a Web Framework/Language Combo for the Next Decade

#13
post #10

I'm also a bit frustrated with the Yii situation, although I do understand why they're doing it. Yii 2.0 is a total rewrite, and it is technically very impressive. However they have had the disadvantage of not being able to ship until it reaches feature parity with 1.1 which has been a huge undertaking. The lead developer, Qiang, is literally the second most active developer on github[0], so it's not like they're not…

Kohana has died as far as I'm concerned. Such a shame, but it was a great replacement for CodeIgniter back in the day. CakePHP tried to hard to be Rails and messed it up, and I've never forgiven it, and it was horribly slow in my benchmarking.

Out of PHP frameworks, I would rule out anything that doesn't use Composer. If you can't use the best bit of tooling PHP has gained lately (other than HHVM) and are stuck copying libraries in by hand, well if you want it to survive then you've made the wrong decision IMO.

Personally, I would pick either Symfony or Laravel, the latter for development speed, the former for robustness and power (and explicitness, I'm working on a 400k line web app in Laravel which has had too many shit developers hacking on it over the last 12 months, and we get bitten by magic weekly because a long since fired or quit dev worked against the framework rather than with it).

Re: Choosing a Web Framework/Language Combo for the Next Decade

#14
Dropwizard is where it's at right now for Java frameworks. It's a superproject that glues together the best pieces out there. Surprised it wasn't on the wikipedia list.

Which brings up another point: if we're talking about web frameworks for the next decade we should really be looking at service-oriented architectures / single-page apps or whatever you want to call that model. It's quite different from the web frameworks of yesteryear that generated UI on the server. Dropwizard can do web views but it really positions itself as a REST service framework.

So, that brings javascript frameworks into the consideration. And the author has a paragraph where he just dismisses it as a "terrible hack"...??? I think that is going to seriously hamper the outcome here. It's good that modern web apps leverage the power of the browser and JS frameworks are the way to do that.

Re: Choosing a Web Framework/Language Combo for the Next Decade

#15
I think another question is how much you want done on the server (HTML rendering?) and how much on the client. It seems like we're definitely moving towards having the client handle all the UI. I understand this may not be appealing, especially as client side frameworks have even a shorter lifespan than server-side frameworks, but that seems to be the direction. If that's acceptable, for the backend I'd choose Java and Dropwizard (or Jersey+Jetty instead of Dropwizard). Spring Boot also seems nice. I discuss the state of modern Java web development in a non-comprehensive recent blog post[1]. For a more complete discussion of JVM web frameworks, you can take a look at this[2] and this[3].

[1]: http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2014/05/15/modern-java-pt3/

[2]: http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/the-curious-coders-java-...

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygW8fJVlDxQ

Re: Choosing a Web Framework/Language Combo for the Next Decade

#16
The other consideration needs to be "How did this mature framework evolve?".

Symfony dumped all symfony1 users up s* creek when Symfony2 came out; Zend framework 2 is an entirely different beast to ZF1...

Are these mature frameworks any more stable than the new ones, or are they new frameworks, phoenix-like in assuming the name of the old one?

Re: Choosing a Web Framework/Language Combo for the Next Decade

#17
I (naturally) think that the article's summarily dismissing Haskell is unfortunate. It's probably just the result of poor PR on Haskell's part.

Haskell is not only for surpassingly intelligent people, or even optimized for them. If anything, it's the opposite: one of its core tenants is that we're not smart enough to reason about our programs in most languages. Much of the design work focuses on unloading complexity into the language, tools and abstractions.

Haskell goes out of its way to prevent common errors and help you design your program. In a very real sense, it trims the "search space" of possible programs, helping you zero in on a reasonable solution. To an extent, I use Haskell because I'm not smart enough to use C.

Haskell is unfamiliar. And people mistake that for some sort of innate difficulty. But the two are not the same.

I would argue that overcoming unfamiliarity is one of the most important ways to grow as both a programmer and, more generally, a person. That's why I think the article focuses too much on choosing a language that's familiar, codifying it as "just about all the good advice". This mindset is far, far too exaggerated in most programmers, and its what really slows down progress, especially for popular programming languages.

The blub paradox is also a bit misrepresented. Being a "blub" programmer is not a matter of being more or less intelligent—it's a matter of not knowing what you're missing. "Beating the Averages" is not "we used Lisp because we were smarter than you"; it's more like "we used Lisp because it offers some incredibly powerful tools that non-Lisp programmers have never used and so do not really appreciate". It's a matter of habits and experience, not intelligence.

My advice? Do try something unfamiliar. Especially if it seems to be higher in the great partial order of programming language power :).

Re: Choosing a Web Framework/Language Combo for the Next Decade

#18
post #14

Dropwizard is where it's at right now for Java frameworks. It's a superproject that glues together the best pieces out there. Surprised it wasn't on the wikipedia list. Which brings up another point: if we're talking about web frameworks for the next decade we should really be looking at service-oriented architectures / single-page apps or whatever you want to call that model. It's quite different from the web framew…

>Dropwizard can do web views but it really positions itself as a REST service framework.

That would eliminate it for me.

Not everyone is coding APIs and fat client web apps. I'd prefer a framework geared up to do standard web apps as well.

Re: Choosing a Web Framework/Language Combo for the Next Decade

#19
post #10

I'm also a bit frustrated with the Yii situation, although I do understand why they're doing it. Yii 2.0 is a total rewrite, and it is technically very impressive. However they have had the disadvantage of not being able to ship until it reaches feature parity with 1.1 which has been a huge undertaking. The lead developer, Qiang, is literally the second most active developer on github[0], so it's not like they're not…

Qiang being so much of the driving force behind Yii is actually a strike against Yii. It would be much better if that load were spread out more, even if that probably would delay a release. SPOFs are not good.

I think most projects have natural leaders, but if Qiang was hit by a bus tomorrow it would be a tragedy but Yii would not die with him. The other core developers, especially Alex and Carsten, are more than capable of picking up the reins, and the project has enough momentum, and has received huge investments of time and energy - it isn't going to go away at this point.
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