After the "Ajax" explosion this past spring there’s been a growing trend: create a web framework! Now less than nine months later there are tens of different frameworks, all shooting for what I see as the same general goal. Let’s review just a couple of these frameworks, organized by their languages:
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails, NARF
- Python
- Django, Pylons, Quixote
- PHP
- Symfony, Cake
- Java
- Jena, Spring Framework
I may have miscategorized a few and I know that’s a very small fraction of the frameworks out there, but it gives you an idea of the spread.
Will all of these frameworks (or a select few) make web development faster? Will more people be able to develop rapidly now, increasing competition? Is it better to go learn a specific framework or write your own that you can reuse? What are the implications of writing exclusively with a certain framework (or language, for that matter)?
I don’t have definitive answers to these questions, but I think they are going to become important in the next few months as the flood of new developers into the industry continues. If any random high school kid can churn out a completely functional interactive web app in a few weeks, companies and old school web app developers may be in trouble.
Hello,
I’m the maintainer of NARF. It isn’t a “Ruby Web Framework” per say. My goal is to raise the level of stability and support for (all) web development in the Ruby language. I’m putting together something like JDBC, or DBI, for ruby web applications.
Cheers,
Patrick
Interesting. Thanks for the insight.