Goodness of micro frameworks and libraries

I spent 10+ years using large frameworks, mainly J2EE and Ruby on Rails. A large framework is a community and set of tools that really frames our working lives. I have received lots of value and success from J2EE and Rails but in the last few years I have grown to prefer micro frameworks line Sinatra (Ruby) and Compojure + Noir + Hiccup (Clojure).

Practitioners who have mastered one of the larger frameworks like Rails, J2EE, Spring, etc. can sometimes impressively and quickly prototype and then build large functioning systems. I had an odd thought this morning, and the more I mull it over, the more it makes sense to me: large frameworks seem to be optimized for consultants and consulting companies for the quick kill: get in, build the most impressive system possible with the minimum resources, and leave after finishing a successful project. This is an oversimplification, but seems to be true in many cases.

The flip side to the initial productivity of large frameworks is a very real "tax" in long term maintenance because there are so many interrelated components in a system - components that might not be used or weakly used.

Micro frameworks are designed to do one or just a few things well and other third party libraires and plugins need to be chosen and integrated. This does take extra time but then the overall codebase with dependencies is smaller and focussed (mostly) on just what is required. I view using micro frameworks and libraries only, and composing systems into distinct services as a longer term strategy to reduce resource costs for systems long term.

I still invest a fair amount of time tracking larger frameworks, recently being especially interested in what is available in Rails 4 and the latest SmartGWT (a nice framework for writing both web client and server side code in Java - lots of functionality, but not as great for quick agile development in my opinion).

Comments

  1. vemv1:00 PM

    I also think that frameworks can be undestood as optimized for consultants. A good example is the emphasis on conventions - which make "context-switching" across projects much wieldier.

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  2. Unknown5:38 PM

    I would also add that some of the benefits offered by large framework are available via Leiningen templates.

    The templates can take care of all the common configuration and setting up the skeleton of the application. The advantage is that you can easily change anything that the template generates, while this is often not the case when using a framework.

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