Why Frameworks Suck

[owen]

Frameworks are what they are, they will save you a lot of time when deadlines are tight and give you tons of free code and documentation to read. But as in everything there are disadvantages and advantages which is why you are reading this article today. This article seeks to outline some of the pitfalls of frameworks in general. It touches a little on programming paradigms which are frameworks but they are all children of the same mother. This article is aimed at the experienced programmer, if you are a noob you will not know half of the things I talk about here so this article will be of no use to you.

....full article

[TwistedPair]

I hear what your saying, but frameworks have made my life a lot easier, I work as a sys admin a small company and when I started here I was called upon to write an intranet website replete with all kinds of modules such as fax management, file repositories etc. etc. I would have thrown up my hands if didn't find most of the tools I needed already built into the framework. On the matter of efficency, i'm in the camp that says that servers are so fast now that code efficency between 500 lines and 1000 isn't really discernible to the end user. The only guys I know who can really can argue otherwise are the mega sites like youtube Facebook and Google where they even consider mysql to be a bottleneck . with regards to obsolescence I have been using the .net framework since version 1 can't say any of my code has died since 2.0 and that's been quite a while.

[owen]

@twistedPair It really depends on which end of the stick you are on, whether you are maintaining something or creating something new. As I said in the article, its all good until you meet up on a wall. I think .net 4.0 is out now but it all depends on how much you are doing and how fast you innovate. Facebook and google need to be on the edge, change is their baby and they are mega sites because they understand how innovation makes money.

[jayrulez]

I don't know about anyone else but I'd rather maintain work that was done in a framework with public documentation available and forum topics with the "gotchas" than the work of some obscure genious where I need to decipher everything. Sure, there are certain shotcomings to using frameworks but IMO, the advantages outweighs the disadvantages by much. Frameworks are tools just as program languages are tools. In hindsight, one could say programming languages are just frameworks built on say for example assembly. We could all do our work in assembly but we don't and for very good reason.

If you develop for a good enough period of time, you will find that you end up maintaining your own little framework to get things moving ASAP when you take on new projects given that your framework is applicable. I would rather to use a publicly available framework that is tested by hundreds or thousands of people, finding bugs and squashing them than to try to maintain my own framework.

You may end up with "useless" code when you use a framework, but doing things from scratch or using your own custom framework doesn't aleviate this problem. I would go out on a limb and say there is more documentation avaibale for frameworks than there is for your code. You may have to share more code than you think you need to be able to share your own work to give it context.
Frameworks do not discourage sharing, there is much evidence to support this in the open source world.

If one wants to spend time and iron out all the quirks of a particular programming language then they are free to do so, but if one wants to get work done, they can use the available tools to get the job done.

Say for example, you need to do a GUI program to run on both windows and linux, will you prefer to use an existing graphical toolkit/framework that is cross platform or spend months/years doing a custom one intertwined in that one particular program?

Frameworks are tools just like programming languages and computers and hammers, you should let them work for you.

[owen]

lol, don't try to mix frameworks into programming languages, you know what frameworks are and don't pretend you don't. They are "frameworks" and are different, mixing them into programming languages and libraries and API's is ignorant speak, I defined what I was talking about VERY clearly. read the wiki page; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_framework