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by danpalmer 612 days ago
I grew up on Django and have separately seen and contributed to numerous Flask codebases. It has become abundantly clear to me that web apps of any real size that use the library approach (rather than framework) typically end up with a poorly documented internal-only framework anyway, and that plugging together libraries has a significant cost. In my experience this is significantly more of an issue in the JS/TS/Node/etc ecosystem.

My rule of thumb is to look at the feature list for a web framework (Django, Rails, Citizen, etc) – sessions, caching, ORM, rendering, routing, auth, admin, static files, APIs, serialisation, etc etc – and if you need 3 or more, just use a framework that has them all properly integrated.

Example, you're sticking an internal API on your ML model, you need one or two endpoints, and to return some JSON. Just use Flask/FastAPI or whatever the equivalent in your ecosystem is.

Alternatively, you're building a user-facing website, you need routing to endpoints, auth, sessions, and a database. Just use a big framework. You'll likely add more of those cross cutting concerns in the future anyway, and having them all work together rather than gluing libraries together will save a ton of time.

Citizen is the first convincing framework I've seen for this approach from the Node ecosystem. Congrats on the 1.0!

2 comments

Hard agree. I’ve been going by the 3 feature rule as well. I’ve seen so many flask projects that end up being poorly integrated django project equivalents. Seems that the entire node ecosystem is the same, until now I guess?
I used to fall into the trap of always wanting to build everything myself, which ironically led to me building a framework so I wouldn't have to do that over and over. So I agree totally.

Every "framework" available when I started with Node seemed to be a collection of loose opinions regarding Node best practices, lightly dusted with syntactic sugar. Functionality I considered table stakes for web apps usually involved choosing from several middleware packages with different maintainers and different syntax. Didn't like it.

Thanks for the compliments. I hope the community sees the value.