Better, Faster, Stronger
Written on April 2 2010.
This blog post was written a long time ago and may not reflect my current opinion or might be technically out of date. Read with a grain of salt.
Web development is a quite hot topic for developers these days. Some think that the web is the future and that native apps are a relic of the past. I would not say that it is that simple (iPhone/iPad apps anyone?) but it is clear that webapps work well for many tasks.
Some years ago frameworks started to appear in order to facilitate the development of web applications. They promise faster development time, more robust application and easy maintenance. We all know that a silver bullet does not exist in software development but it's kinda funny to see what all those frameworks promise. Here are some excerpts from some website of them.Spring (Java)
Spring delivers significant benefits for many projects, increasing development productivity and runtime performance while improving test coverage and application quality.
CakePHP (PHP)
CakePHP enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications.
iliad (Smalltalk)
Iliad is a Smalltalk web application framework. It is designed to be simple and make web development as effective as possible.
Catalyst (Perl)
Catalyst will make web development something you had never expected it to be: Fun, rewarding and quick.
Symfony (PHP)
It [Symfony] provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster.
Ruby on Rails (Ruby)
Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beatiful code by favoring convention over configuration.
Pylons (Python)
Pylons is a lightweight web framework
emphasizing flexibility and rapid development
Django (Python)
Django makes it easier to build better Web apps more quickly and with less code.
Seaside (Smalltalk)
Wow with all those promises, you have no excuse to deliver crappy webapps. I like those headlines have no meaning at all. Do not trust someone who is pretending that everything will be easy with his tool/framework. Except when the tool in question is Clojure or Smalltalk of course :)
Seaside provides a layered set of abstractions over HTTP and HTML that let you build highly interactive web applications quickly, reusably and maintainably.