List of minimalist frameworks

There is no trend towards lighter frameworks.

Frameworks were originally being developed by people with high-end needs. They are then also adopted by people with low-end needs, who conclude that the framework is too big and complicated for them, and start developing/adopting more light weight frameworks.

This market is still young, so there are no dominant players like Rails, Django or Symfony yet.

It's more a matter of chronological than a trend. Big frameworks are still being used on a massive scale where appropriate, it's just a more stable market where the only news is the next release.

Wow. that's brilliant. As we would say on tumblr " This is why we can have nice things".

I'm actually experimenting with `scotty` for haskell now. Though a tad limited (getting sessions to work is a bit whiney) I had a decently working URL-shortener up and running in an hour of composing haskell modules and writing a max of 20 lines of code.

This whole micro-framework thing is getting close to my view of the ideal way of programming. Use as much reusable components at any time. There is always someone who did what you were trying and probably already did it better. I prefer investing time in finding the right micro-frameworks then investing time to learn to program things in new ways (is this a bad thing?). Anyhow, I see a lot of classmates implementing their new login systems for their little websites in pure PHP and i'm just staring at them like 'what the hell'. Especially in things involving security, composable 'micro-modules' are a blessing. I just combine a few libraries and whoop I got an https server that securly talks to a database that securly stores credentials and sessions. I think it's just beautiful.

Okay of course I do implement things myself. that that is more out of curiosity. I'm like 'hey how does this security stuff work? how do I break things?' and I read up about it and prototype a little. but I would _never_ use such code in production just because I know someone already did better.

So yeah. to sum it up. programming microframeworks give us this:

* small, modularized code * where each module on its own is at its best * where the composition of these modules is clear. * and the result is highly maintainable code.

I would even want to take it a step further. Where certain kind of frameworks stick to the same standard. Think Promises/A+ or WAI. Now at any time in the future, I can give my whole codebase a speed boost by just changing a single line. Isn't this great?

I couldn't agree more.

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.

There's also the Nancy lightweight web framework for .NET https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy http://nancyfx.org/