Wandering Thoughts archives

2014-07-05

Another reason to use frameworks like Django

The traditional reason to use web app frameworks like Django is that doing saves you time and perhaps gives you a more solid and polished result, possibly with useful extra features like Django's admin interface. But it has recently struck me that in many situations there is another interesting reason for using frameworks (or a defence of doing so instead of writing your own code).

Let's start by assuming that your application really needs at least some of the functionality you're using from the framework. For example, perhaps you're using the ORM and database functionality because that's what the framework makes easiest (this is our reason) but you really need the URL routing and HTML form handling and validation. Regardless of whether or not you used a framework, your application needs some code somewhere that does all of this necessary work. With a framework, the code mostly lives in the framework and you call the framework; without a framework, you would have to write your own code for it (and you use it directly). The practical reality is that the code for the functionality your application genuinely needs has to come from somewhere, either from a framework (if you use one) or from your own work and code.

If you write your own code, what are the odds that it will be as well documented and as solid as the code in a framework? Which will likely be easier for a co-worker to pick up later, custom code that you wrote from scratch or code that calls a standard framework in a standard or relatively standard way? If you only need a little bit of functionality and thus only need to write a little bit of code, this can certainly work out. But if you need a lot of functionality, so much that you're duplicating a lot of what a framework does, well, I am not so optimistic, because in effect what you're really doing is creating a custom one-off framework.

This suggests an obvious way to balance out whether or not to use a framework (or from some perspectives, to inflict either a framework or your own collection of code on your co-workers). To maximize the benefits of using a framework you should be writing as little of your own code as possible, talking to the framework in its standard way, and the framework needs to be well documented, because all of this plays to the strengths of the framework over your own code. If the framework is hard to pick up, your code to deal with it is complex, and replacing it would only be a modest amount of custom code, well, the case for your own code is strong.

(I'm not sure this way of thinking has anything to say about the ever popular arguments over minimal frameworks versus big frameworks with 'batteries included' and good PR. A big framework might be worse because it requires you to learn more before you can start using the corner of it you need, or it might be better because you need less custom code to connect various minimal components together. It certainly feels like how much of the framework you need ought to matter, but I'm not sure this intuition is correct.)

python/FrameworkUsageReason written at 01:31:39; Add Comment


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