What is a web development framework?

What is a web development framework?

Don’t you agree that with powerful tools life is much easier? This is what frameworks do for web developers – make their job (and life) easier. Web development frameworks can be applied for any websites to modify them with a standardized set of design & development solutions. As a matter of fact, frameworks are highly effective tools that keep devs from having to reinvent the wheel over and over again while moving from one project to another. 

Want to hear more on this topic? Read this post to learn about what is the main purpose of WDFs, why to use frameworks, a quick list of popular ones, and how to pick a helpful framework. So, let’s jump right into it.

What role do frameworks play in web development?

In brief, a web development framework (or WDF) is a software framework designed with the main purpose – provide support. Frameworks streamline and simplify web development. This includes custom web development services, APIs, and web resources. Web frameworks are incredibly effective whenever it comes down to building and deploying web apps. The common activities that take place in web development can be automated, thanks to WDFs. 

In other words, web frameworks let you automatically create app’s functions, which saves time. For example, frameworks provide a standard way to develop a common set of functionalities for web apps like user login, handling sessions, data validation, error handling, etc.  

What WDFs are preferred by the custom web development industry players?

Top web frameworks that are highly preferred by the industry players:

Ruby on Rails: most popular WDF which follows push-based MVC architecture. Ruby on Rails is considered as the general purpose WDF.

AngularJS: an open source framework that is maintained mostly by Google. Web developers like this framework for its ability to extend HTML vocabulary for website development.

Ember.js: one of the best platforms for building ambitious web apps. Developers use Ember.js for developing scalable single-page web apps.

CakePHP: one of the most popular open-source platforms which is written in PHP. This framework makes web development much faster & simpler.

ASP.net: a web app development platform mainly utilized for building robust desktop & mobile apps.  

Apart from those, web developers also like to work with Meteor, Django, Laravel and Flask.

What things do you need to keep in mind while choosing the WDF?

Since web development processes involve lots of stuff like HTML, JS, CSS  for front-end, DBMS (or NoSQL) for back-end for developing Storage. In this case, WDF becomes a connector between the front-end and the Storage.

At the same time, every programming language has a lot of frameworks like Django or RoR. And frameworks like Flask, Bottle, Sinatra are used for creating web apps. So, learning about WDFs is very helpful. But one size doesn’t fit everyone’s needs.

Here are a few important aspects to consider while choosing a helpful framework:

  • Proper documentation: pay close attention to how well the framework has been documented. This applies to comments in the source code and internals as well.
  • Check whether the external library support can be easily added to standard login procedure.
  • Check if the existing framework specific libraries can be replaced by the third party libraries.
  • Utilize elements that are common to most frameworks (or even to all of them) like forms, templating, ORM.
  • Check the number of open issues/closed issues in Github.
  • Always go by solving problems on the programming language level rather than at the WDF level.
  • Pay attention to how big the community is which supports this framework.

Just a side note: In case you really like a particular framework, you can skip what we’ve just talked about. And go for it!

 

Bottom-line

Yes, frameworks are great for working with medium-large projects. WDFs can solve many programmers’ headaches such as CRUD, security, routing, etc. For example, instead of starting to write rules of routing by hand with many security issues in mind, use frameworks and get things done faster.

However, WDFs are just tools. They can’t provide you with everything that you need in web development. Which means that you’ll have to think about some processes all by yourself. One of the good solutions might be to use micro frameworks instead of all-round frameworks. The reason is it gives more creativity and can elevate web development skills to a certain extent. Another smart solution is to contact highly skilled experts like SolveIt. 

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