Ask HN: The next generation web framework?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12440464

by was_boring • 10 years ago

2 4 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It appears that Rails and Node's various projects (koa, express, hapi, etc.) are all dying -- or at least aren't popular within the past year on this site. There has been some mild uptick in django, which is surprising.

So what is the next generation web framework to take the engineering world by storm? Perhaps we are in a lull?

angersock• 10 years ago

My general shilling would be for Elixir, but let's just stop for a second.

Why do we need another web framework? Are we truly so far past displaying data munged from a database and occasionally filling queries over JSON APIs that we need some new shiny? Have our projects, our jobs, our work really changed so much in character that any of the existing stuff can be improved on by yet another set of tools to learn?

I think that more churn is something all of us should look at as annoying at best, wasteful usually, and huge trouble at worst.

smt88• 10 years ago

From HN posts, it seems to me that people are moving in these directions:

OO -> FP

frameworks -> libraries

ORMs -> query builders

weak typing -> strong typing

dynamic typing -> static typing

Rails, Koa, etc. fall on the "before" side of the trend, whereas things like React fall on the "after" side.

niftich• 10 years ago

They're not dying. They've gone through the Hype Cycle [1] and have moved from being new and exciting tools to being just... tools.

[1] http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hyp...

smt88's post is consistent with what I've been seeing as well. Two or three years ago there was an uptick in gradual typing as a transition from dynamic typing to static typing.

Functional Programming's influence and inspiration is showing everywhere, from .map() and .filter() utility libraries, to Functions-as-a-Service (Lambda, "serverless") computing, to Java 8, Model-View-Update (where Update is a Pure Function) stuff like Elm, Redux.

The NoSQL hype is finally over, we now have datastore decision diagrams that help us pick a database on its merits.

We are starting to realize that doing complex stateful logic on the client often means also doing complex stateful logic on the server and synchronizing the two, so single-purpose libraries like React are heading towards a world where we'll be rendering on the server again and just pushing virtual dom diffs on the wire. We have all the pieces right now, but so far no one has come along and done this yet.

Opinionated frameworks are falling out of favor; everything is about minimalistic libraries you have to chain together yourself. While this means more creative freedom, it also means more moving parts to orchestrate, and more problems you have to think about yourself.

aprdm• 10 years ago

Since when did stable / used became a synonymous for dying? Is Python dying? Java?

Ask HN: The next generation web framework?

Related Stories