Over the past few days I have been working on selecting the web backend for our project. Last client meeting I had narrowed it down to django, a python based framework that is popular right now, and play, a Java/Scala based framework that is also becoming quite popular.
Evaluating which framework to use has been quite a challenge. They all seem to support all the features we care about. They are all expressive and "easy" to use. They all seem great.
As a team, we have a stronger background in Java, but we are also Computer Scientists and should be able to pick up a new (newish as we have some prior experience with Python) language in just a few days.
But web frameworks are much more that a library for a given language, they are a meta language unto themselves. The web has evolved in such a way that when we "surf the internet" we are using a number of technologies at once, many not designed to work with each other, connected together in strange an opaque ways. Web frameworks allow the programmer to once again be a programmer, rather than a Rube Goldberg machine master.
Further complicating the issue is the fact that are so many good web frameworks. The only way to truly compare one framework to another is to site down and write an app in both frameworks. Alas, this means learning two frameworks (or more), which is not a task that the busy student enjoys. But it must be done.
No comments:
Post a Comment