[nepenthe2]

I refer to them as "convenience frameworks" as they usually provide what I need most often such as very basic routing, auth(thentication/orization),sessions, templates and maybe an ORM but also easily allow me to plug in something else. I tend to stay away from the "heavy" frameworks such as Rails and Catalyst and Django. Those might be called "full stack" frameworks.

I consider something like Perl's Dancer and Python's Flask(based out of Werkzeug) as very similar frameworks to Sinatra.

[spooneybarger]

I'm rather interested here... once you have routing, auth, sessions, templates and an orm... how is that not heavy? we are talking terminology here so i'm really interested in when you consider the line for 'heavy' gets crossed?

for me what you describe above would be heavy in my mind.

as i'm trying to come up w/ terminology that will convey my general idea to the widest range of people possible and yours is so far the farthest afield from what i was thinking of, you have really peeked my interest.

[nepenthe2]

Because while all those "conveniences" are available you are not at the mercy of more opinionated frameworks like Rails. You are free to use them or add your own or use none.

I don't have time to do simple request/response building although if I did Python's Paste/Webob would be my choice so I choose frameworks that I can add in the usual "extra" requirements that I do need.

This blog post is a couple of years old but sheds some light on the abundance of frameworks in the Python world at least. The closing section sums up the difference between full stack frameworks and lighter frameworks.

http://bitworking.org/news/Why_so_many_Python_web_frameworks

Another term I've seen around is "utility library" instead of framework. Perhaps that is better?

[lightcatcher]

Flask (which calls itself a microframework) is built on top of Werkzeug (which calls itself a WSGI utility library).

When I hear utility library, I think more low level than microframework.

[spooneybarger]

Ah yes, that makes perfect sense- when I read and, I read it as all inclusive rather than pick and choose.