And then you change a job and you take 80% knowledge with you and your now-past project is in deep trouble.
Not to mention that the interesting parts of your app should be the domain logic and workarounds and solutions used in it for business issues and historical layers of bussiness logic choices. And that a single person can take with them whether there's a framework or not.
> Not to mention that the interesting parts of your app should be the domain logic and workarounds and solutions used in it for business issues and historical layers of bussiness logic choices.
In my experience this has been a point in favor of OTS frameworks--the code you don't care about is handled by the framework, and you bring the business logic. But also, reading through this, I guess I don't understand your comment. Isn't the business logic in the code? How can a person take it with them?
Its not guaranteed. I've seen many developers spend lots of time trying to get the framework they're working in to cooperate or dig through bad documentation. Framework authors are fallible too and general-purpose software is really hard to get right.
I wonder if some of the disagreements in this thread are just like, people in favor of frameworks used Rails/Django, people against them used Spring/Struts.
> Framework authors are fallible too and general-purpose software is really hard to get right.
Yeah, I think that's solved by the "market". There was a big explosion of Python frameworks in the aughts: TurboGears, CherryPy, Pyramid/Pylons, Zope, web.py, etc. etc. Lots of stuff. The ecosystem now is Django/FastAPI (Flask/Tornado legacy apps are either stuck or moving to FastAPI IME). Django got it right.
But more broadly, what are the odds a bespoke framework will do it right? Will you think up a new way to organize controllers, or to abstract auth, or to manage database sessions, etc. etc. etc. That sounds like a nightmare to me; just let me focus on the business logic please, haha.
The market will settle on "good enough for the average usecase".
> But more broadly, what are the odds a bespoke framework will do it right? Will you think up a new way to organize controllers, or to abstract auth, or to manage database sessions, etc. etc. etc.
Some of this is a nightmare indeed (e.g. dealing with any web security stuff). Other things are very straightforward, especially when you don't have to deal with 1000 other people's use cases but only your own.
> just let me focus on the business logic please
We all want this. The question we should be asking is do we spend more time fighting a 3rd party framework or implementing our own. The answer may well be we'd spend more time implementing our own - but its still important to be aware if things start to go south.
> ... fighting a 3rd party framework ...
Can you give some examples of this? I'm personally finding it hard to come up with examples where this is a significant problem. The closest I can get is I worked on a Django REST Framework project where we went all-in on serializers, but then ripped it out because performance wasn't where we wanted it to be. But it's pretty easy to not use serializers in DRF, so it wasn't actually significant.
- Angular v1. Scope, transclusion, watchers, directives, DI and things randomly breaking.
- Almost all of the modern devops configuration tools. Would be easily replaced by some very basic typescript functions / libraries and Deno. In fact, cdk8s (which is typescript) comes with a mandatory jsii layer included, adding about 150MB of node_modules. This layer translates between the TS API and other languages you might use (Python etc). You get it even if you don't use the other languages and it has measurable impact on e.g. CI run times
- Bazel (another "build framework"). You just wanted some basic build caching, but get to do all the work for perfect hermeticity instead, which includes things like different directories, dealing with symlinks and dealing with tools that handle those symlinks poorly.
Its really, really easy to pick the wrong tool(s).
But is it a reasonable alternative to build an alternative to webpack yourself? Or Angular? I would bet some people have tried/done this, and also have some frustrating experiences.
My point is I think you have to be _very_ careful when deciding to take on a big engineering project, like making your own JS build tool. Will the improvements in devex really outweigh the engineering hour investment? IME the answer is almost always no, what usually happens is you get a half-baked, non-documented/tested system, and reading through this thread, I'm not sure any of the anti-framework people have shown convincing examples where they did better than an OTS framework.
Or if they did, they released it! Django is famously one such instance, or your Bazel example. It seems like they bet right, or did a lot of off-hours work (pretty sure that's the case w/ Django haha) to get it going.
Before code-splitting, yes, it was quite easy (not much harder than building a makefile). Webpack is difficult and complex because it has to cater to literally thousands of tools (https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=webpack%20plugin). An individual project can choose to use a simple js-only bundler and a copy command for static assets.
There was nothing to release there, however - we just wrote the equivalent of a makefile. It was not a big engineering project at all.
Would I do the same thing today? No, because of code splitting and because there are simpler, faster bundlers out there already (esbuild).
> Will the improvements in devex really outweigh the engineering hour investment? IME the answer is almost always no, what usually happens is you get a half-baked, non-documented/tested system, and reading through this thread, I'm not sure any of the anti-framework people have shown convincing examples where they did better than an OTS framework.
This is, where I think we differ. I think much more often than not, we already have half-baked, poorly documented systems which we insist on trying to use, even if the team is quite capable of building something better. This is also one of the reasons we have JS fatigue - its not because the language or even the browser somehow prevents something better from being built, its because we keep insisting on using poorly designed tools or tools designed to solve problems that large companies have but we don't really have.
If it's a matter of training up other people, we're just as well becoming experts in a framework
You are both right and also describing every single company I've seen. I haven't worked in a straight up software company, though. Maybe they have things better.
But I described the reality.
Yes you still have to know how it's glued together but at least there is still standardisation whilst still being flexible enough to swap individual libraries
Not a perfect solution but a good compromise in my experience
Use frameworks, use libraries. They will save you time, make your code less buggy, make it easier to hire other people.
Writing your own ball of mud is great for a hobby but not for business.
And even worse when these frameworks are open source and don't even have any accountable people at all, and god knows how many people working professionally are suddenly held hostage by some dude who just felt like going backpacking in south america for 6 months without giving any notice to anyone.
It'd be like saying I always make my own food from scratch — have you seen the state of the burger van down on the corner? You can't trust food made by others.
All frameworks aren't created equal — as with any tooling, you choose something based on the features of the framework but also the longevity, reputation and ecosystem built around it.
Thinking about this case more, this is exactly what you want from frameworks: compatibility guarantees. Frameworks break compatibility, but deliberately and slowly. Will your in-house framework do that? Will it announce and well document its intent to deprecate functionality in favor of new features? Will it find all the users of it across your enterprise and work with them on migration strategies? Will it build in deprecation notices for literally years? Will it build in tests for the bridging changes? Django does all of this, for you, for free.
No, I'm not. The guy who quit 2 years ago was. I've worked with custom frameworks, and while they where both clever and powerful with some quite cool features which would have been tricky to do in a more generic framework, they where also virtually undocumented, fragile, difficult to extend and slow to get people up to speed on.
I see this more often when the project is open source. For some reason we feel like when its not, we don't need to pay attention to the documentation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
To commoditize a critical (and formerly well compensated) skill for the purpose of outsourcing it to the country with the cheapest possible labor?
I broadly agree with GP here, but to round out some of their points:
- Frameworks take care of the parts of your application that aren't special. In the same way garbage collection isn't the value your company provides to customers, HTTP header parsing (or whatever) isn't either.
- Frameworks prevent your team from diving down architecture rabbit holes, or having to read a bunch of books on DDD, or what have you. This sounds like a small point, but if you tracked the number of expensive engineering hours spent disagreeing about where code should go, look like, and work, you would realize it's a pretty big one.
- Frameworks are tested way better than you ever could by thousands of users, actually documented, contain compatibility guarantees, and have security policies. To match this quality, your company would probably spend millions of dollars on eng hours. That's why company-specific frameworks don't match this quality.
- Frameworks make onboarding way easier. Most Python engineers know Django; most Ruby engineers know Rails. By definition, you can't hire engineers that already know your framework (even if you use something like Hexagonal, because no two implementations of this are alike). And again, because your in-house framework will be poorly tested/documented/etc., new hires will struggle. They'll also wonder if this is a career cul-de-sac: "I have 4 years of irrelevant experience in [bespoke framework X]" is not an enticing resume bullet.
> Your software is custom made for your organisation, it's not mass producing identical systems on an assembly line
This returns us to the palace vs. suburbs framing. The software you write is a super small percentage of the code that runs your app, all the way from firmware to CSS libraries. Good engineering is carefully deciding what code you will write yourself, because code isn't just implementation, it's design, buy-in, maintenance, documentation, and liability. Some enterprises are replacing a big chunk of that stack (Oxide or Cloudflare come to mind), but I bet 95% of companies are just building REST/GraphQL servers. That's not special enough to require a custom, in-house framework. You should just build the house the regular way.
Of which you are the creator and expert, and have complete control and insight, and can change it in any way you want any time. It is in 100% alignment with your goals at all time.
If you use a framework your organisation becomes incredibly complex, because you are now actually competing against the needs of other companies, your competitors, which are also influencing the framework.
Your software is custom made for your organisation, it's not mass producing identical systems on an assembly line, so it doesn't make sense to share a common platform like you do with cars. And even if you did, this platform would be a joint venture, and absolutely not made by a subcontractor, and no way in hell some random unpredictable volunteering hobby organisation.