Evaluating web frameworks

Abundance

Author(s):

Stop re-inventing the wheel and build your web applications with the excellent tools already available.

One theme I’ve noticed in many large web applications is badly reinvented wheels. I suspect a lot of this is caused by the “not invented here” syndrome or by developers who want to avoid external dependencies (portability is nice). The problem is that virtually all web applications have a rather complex set of requirements and security needs that often are not implemented well (if at all). And, a lot of us who have been programming web applications for more than a decade might still be a bit mentally stuck in the 2000s, when a little HTML and some form fields were all you needed to make an “interactive” site that actually worked quite well. Conversely, I can’t help but think newer programmers aren’t aware of all the problems already discovered and solved in frameworks during the past decade and a half.