←back to thread

133 points avan1 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
liampulles ◴[] No.45078861[source]
I'm starting to build a bit of antagonism to all-encompassing frameworks (e.g. Spring, Larvel, Phoenix, etc.), because while they are productive to build new things with, I seem to always have the same issue on legacy projects built with them.

It always seems to be a challenge to upgrade dependencies for these projects. Its usually because (in building the thing) one can't fully follow the "prescribed" way of doing things with the god framework, because each project has to deal with a niche infrastructure environment and/or business context that requires some hack or additional dependency. Then when you need to, say, upgrade a language version, you can't follow the god framework's guide for doing this (if there even is a decent one) because it will break your workaround. So you end up with this hodgepodge which never gets updated until it reaches a critical point where it cannot continue to run on your infrastructure, and it forces a big migration project.

Using a selection of libraries to build up the elements of a web service, and creating your own high-level abstractions for utilizing them, does require an additional time investment, but it leaves you in more control to do upgrades piece by piece, and to pivot the way things work when it is needed.

I feel like the Go ecosystem follows the latter approach more than most, and it was bit of a mindset shift for me at first, but I've grown to appreciate it.

replies(10): >>45079009 #>>45079250 #>>45079251 #>>45079544 #>>45079627 #>>45079933 #>>45080311 #>>45080715 #>>45082526 #>>45083171 #
1. 3eb7988a1663 ◴[] No.45079627[source]
In the Python world, I see this as the microframework (Flask-esque) vs macroframework (Django). I will take Django every single time.

Flask prescribes so little that every project is a snow flake. Which of the N available options will you pick to handle auth/templating/cookies/email/whatever. Real decision fatigue when trying to enable core functionality. Extra special is that many of these libraries are single author creations, so maintenance and security are a mixed bag.

Django - every project roughly looks the same. You get so much out of the box that you must have special requirements if you must supplement with libraries. Since so many bits are first party, you have greater confidence that code is being maintained/checked for security problems.