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The Perfect Web Framework


I’ve been paid professionally to work with or have messed around with many web frameworks. To name most of them:

  • Perl/CGI
  • RoR
  • a tiny bit of Django
  • ASP.NET WebForms
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • FubuMVC
  • MonoRail
  • a tiny bit of OpenRasta (sorry Sebastian, I keep failing to find time to dig into this more. I really mean to, I promise!)
  • Apache Struts
  • Java JSP
  • Java Servlets
  • Java Server Faces
  • A bunch of other of the myriad of Java web frameworks
  • PHP
  • ASP
  • A bunch more that I can’t remember or aren’t worth mentioning

Each of them offers a little, but at the huge expense of getting in your way a lot of time.

The more and more I use more of them, the more I come to the conclusion that the perfect web framework looks like this:

public string Get(IDictionary<string, string> request)
{
  //TODO: Stuff here
}
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Posted Jun 23 2009, 01:32 AM by chadmyers
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Comments

Simone wrote re: The Perfect Web Framework
on 06-23-2009 5:10 AM

Looks a lot like CGI back in the '90s :)

Just more testable

Ben Lovell wrote re: The Perfect Web Framework
on 06-23-2009 6:51 AM

Ha! You need to look at rack:

http://rack.rubyforge.org/

Almost exactly what you described :)

Slava wrote re: The Perfect Web Framework
on 06-23-2009 7:35 AM

Sinatra (Ruby web framework) rules!

James Avery wrote re: The Perfect Web Framework
on 06-23-2009 7:55 AM

You should check out WebMachine (an erlang web framework that is just about that simple)

Ryan Riley wrote re: The Perfect Web Framework
on 06-23-2009 10:10 AM

I agree with Ben; that looks like Rack. OpenRasta is pretty close, as well, and handles expected HTTP response codes very well.

Tobin Harris wrote re: The Perfect Web Framework
on 06-23-2009 10:32 AM

+1 for Sinatra. It's a tiny tiny bit more involved than the story above, but beautiful nonetheless.

nightshade427@yahoo.com wrote re: The Perfect Web Framework
on 06-23-2009 12:08 PM

@Slava "Sinatra (Ruby web framework) rules!" +1

Brian wrote re: The Perfect Web Framework
on 06-23-2009 12:23 PM

That's almost identical to RACK. +1

John Bubriski wrote re: The Perfect Web Framework
on 06-24-2009 10:29 AM

I think the problem is that you can't really "mess around" with frameworks, as it gets you nowhere.  What you really need to do is LEARN a framework.  The purpose of a framework is to make the common things very easy to do, provide stability etc.  Unless you commit to a framework and learn it and use it, I don't think you can really evaluate how useful it is.  Frameworks should also be extremely intuitive so you don't waste time trying to figure out how "they" did it, and should NOT get in your by keeping underlying functionality available (for the most part).

Shaun wrote re: The Perfect Web Framework
on 07-26-2009 1:04 PM

I'm late to this party but thought I'd

weigh in with Sinatra and CherryPy.

I have much the same history and preference

that you describe and found these stay out

of my way while still doing what I want.

DotNetBurner - ASP.net wrote The Perfect Web Framework
on 09-12-2009 5:56 PM

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