As of late, there has been a great deal of attention paid to web frameworks and these huge time savings that are supposed to be based on the framework selected. Ruby on Rails is, perhaps, the most famous and the one with the most devoted base. I played with Rails for a bit and the honest truth was that I liked the Ruby part a lot better than the Rails part. Rails tried to do a lot, to "help"--and I didn't like it. I have written similar dislikes for CakePHP which is, by its own admission, an attempt to bring Rails to PHP. Cake is not the only attempt to give PHP users the bliss of Rails. There is also PHP on Trax and Akelos and heaven knows how many others.
It's not just the PHP boys hopping at the Rails hype. The BBC created a Perl on Rails. Heck, on cliki I even found a project named Lisp on Lines that endeavors to provide a "Rails-like" environment in Common Lisp.
ASP.NET is a little better. It doesn't try to help with ORM or a lot else, but I can't help but feel that it has a tendency to be a little stiff at times. Though it is definitely one of the better frameworks out there (and, yes, it is only a framework; contrary to all-too-popular belief, you can write ASP.NET in any .NET language).
What I am saying is that I, personally, want a minimalist framework. I want to be able to assemble a toolkit based on the project at hand, not what is encouraged by the framework. I don't want to write a plugin to be able to use a bit of JavaScript effectively. Here is what a web framework should provide:
- Spackling over request details. I need the contents of the GET and the POST, but I sure as heck don't want to write a GET and POST parser for every application. Preferably, this would also spackle over the exact source of the request. When writing an application, I don't care whether the request came over CGI, FastCGI, an IIS filter, or mod_lang. I want to the variables and that's it.
- A templating engine. A simple, minimalist templating engine. Nothing too fancy and, if I so desire, I should be able to ignore it with impunity or even substitute another. This should be one of the most loosely coupled pieces of the framework. As time goes on, I also expect a minimum of widgets and gadgets to be provided as we get an increasingly large amount of sites and apps whose UI is AJAX/Flash/Insert-RIA-here driven. I really like Smarty for PHP work (which has a plugin API, but not controls in the ASP.NET sense). ASP.NET's templating engine is good, but its server-side controls are biased towards a method of development that is either outdated (controls rendered and handled serverside) or opaque (how does that callback work, again?).
- Pretty URL support. Yes, there is mod_rewrite and friends, but it makes things much cleaner to have only a couple of mod_rewrite rules and handle the rest application side.
- Session management. HTTP is stateless, but web applications, as we all know, are not. Session management is not difficult so much as it is an annoyance to write with every app.
Data access should not, as a rule, be involved. Particularly, data access in which it is difficult to perform raw queries against the database. Generic, all encompassing data access layers are hard to use because they make a number of assumptions (in the name of simplicity) that simply do not hold true for everything. Worst of all are the schema assumptions that frameworks like Cake make.
Django is the exception to the rule, though. Their DAL is excellent. You write an object model that inherits from some base classes. This is used as a very thin layer and you can still easily (yes, easily is the key word; I know you can write raw queries in Cake and Rails, but they try to hide it as much as possible) drop down into plain old SQL. This way, the developer is not boxed in by such things as the dictionary included in the framework.
One time, I wrote an app in CakePHP and I used a term for an entity, I cannot remember what, that had a plural not recognized by Cake; now Cake requires that all tables have plural names. The plural for this word was not recognized, even though it was the correct English usage. This caused the DAL to go haywire and cost me an hour or two of debugging.
The overwhelming philosophy is to provide basic support for that which needs to be done in the act of serving up a web application and leave everything else to the user. The new wave of frameworks tries to do as much as possible for the user. In this sense, a framework is like any other tool or any other application: when you try to do the user's work for them and are overzealous about making things "easy", you get underfoot and make things difficult. RoR has made the "blog in 10 minutes" example almost mandatory for a new framework. Well, it's great that you can throw together a simple blog in 10 minutes, but who wants to? Therein lies yet another rub: RoR and its kin are tuned towards mass producing almost-clones of certain types of applications. I, for one, do not like writing lots of almost-clones. I'd rather download Drupal or any one of a thousand other open source packages and configure that than write a custom almost-clone. What I want in a web framework is small. So, can I have that framework, yet?