|
I don't know how some of you guys have the time to get real experience with dozens of frameworks. I've only really used a few. Out of what I've used, Ruby is my favorite language, and I use Rails for anything with a database, and Sinatra for anything without. Thoughts: ActiveRecord is the best ORM I've used so far. You don't need a ton of boilerplate or config to get up and running with it. It supports all of the basic stuff, and seems to do it well, and for more complex stuff, it makes it easy to drop down to SQL instead of trying to put a ton of ugly glue on top of doing complex stuff in SQL. I like the way Rails has commands to output the whole route table, and the whole middleware stack it's using. Along those lines, I like the way the router works, and the way that most of the advanced functionality is neatly tucked into middleware that you can add or remove. I like the flexibility of being able to plug in a bunch of JS processors, template languages, CSS processors, etc. I like how much functionality you can add by just throwing a gem in the Gemfile, and the Bundler system does a good job of tracking gem versions to keep all environments consistent. Competitors I've used: ASP.NET MVC: Too much functionality is buried in either the IIS server or other libs that you can't debug into easily. I don't like the routing much - there's too many ways to specify routes, all of which seem unclear, and there's no single place to see all of your routes as the framework sees them and where they all route to. Plus the often-incomprehensible method argument matching. MVC tries to be all clever in deserializing arbitrary JSON and XML into .NET objects, which is handy when it works, but good luck debugging what happened when it doesn't work, and good luck if you just want it give you the freakin' request data as a plain old string. I've spent hours smashing my head against trying to get MVC to actually route my requests to the intended controller methods and do something reasonable with the request data. And I still haven't made sense of Entity Framework. I've also toyed with things in Java, NodeJS/Express, and a few other things, but I don't feel like I've really used them enough to offer an opinion, besides noting that the "common knowledge" of Java being verbose and over-complex, and NodeJS/Express being too bare bones seem accurate. |