Here’s a question for the non-developers among our readers:
What web framework is this a screen-shot of?
Answer:
(If you answered “Wordpress” you’re wrong)
- it’s actually from something called TinyMCE – which happens to be used for editing blog posts as part of wordpress – but it’s certainly not “wordpress” – it’s commonly used when building all kinds of sites – using all kinds of frameworks.
What wordpress actually looks like (for the people who build wordpress sites):
Wordpress:
You may not have got much from looking at that screen-shot – so, for comparison, here are what two other common web frameworks look like to the people that use them to build websites:
Turbogears:
Drupal:
The chances are that you probably wouldn’t have been able to guess which one of those was which [unless you are a developer who has worked on one or more of them for an extended period of time].
Which brings me back to the post title – What is the greatest web framework ever?
Well that depends on what you’ve got experience with, and what site you want to build.
So What’s the best?
For some reason, people often seem to thing there’s a golden bullet to solve all their problems – both developers and clients. During a discussion the other day I likened this argument to saying
“Excel is great – it’s the best Application ever”
- and from that point forward only using Excel – for anything.
You want to play some music while you work, so you fire up Excel, and start rocking out – Sure, some might say that Excel just isn’t as good at playing music as iTunes – but you carry on because “It’s the best Application ever”
Then you want to check your emails – so you fire up Excel again (Your colleagues are sniggering behind you as you ask the jumping paperclip how many new emails you’ve had today – but you use it all the same…)
Oh hang on – you don’t!
Yet as developers we often find that we’re required to build a site using a specific technology – because “It’s the best application ever”
Some examples:
If you’re creating a blog then wordpress is really great – if you’re editing a blog post then there’s a TinyMCE already built-in, along with blog comments, and the ability to list blog posts in reverse-chronological order on the frontpage. If you don’t want those features – or you want other features, then you’re going to have to start building those things from scratch – that means no easy-editing form, no automatic page generation etc (unless you code it yourself).
Google Wave is written using GWT – which is a great tool for their specific requirements as it lets you design web applications that look like desktop applications in a very nice manner (if you’re a pythonista then you’d probably try something like pyjamas for that).
One of the web apps I spend a lot of time in is written in a mixture of Python and ANSI C (no web framework at all) – and that’s the best decision for that application and it’s requirements.
Another project I work on is in Zope – and another one is based around the Shindig OpenSocial framework – again, they’re the right frameworks for the tasks at hand
- and they’re all different because the tasks are all different.
