Web frameworks have been taking up an awful lot of bandwidth on the net lately. There's a huge amount of activity in various communities, from Python to Ruby and Java.
A significant aspect of the advocacy seems to focus on screencasts, slick websites and blogstreams. And while there's no doubt that all this activity is ultimately a good thing for everybody, I have to wonder where peoples' priorities are.
The most obvious project to point to is Ruby on Rails, which has garnered a huge amount of attention for its approach to web development. This has in turn spurred a flurry of activity in the Python camp, which has seen the likes of Django, TurboGears (and several others) experience a huge surge of activity and interest. This has in turn caused a shakeup in the Java world, which appears to have stagnated to some extent over the last few years.
The philosophy behind Ruby on Rails (RoR) is the KISS principle: simple, fast and clean. And there's a great appeal in such an approach. The website and screencasts also reflect this philosophy, as do the applications in the RoR stable: Basecamp, Foo and so on.
But their major selling point of frameworks like RoR and TurboGears appears to be that they enable you to write a wiki in 20 minutes. Clearly they make easy stuff easy. But that's not really what I'm after. I really don't care if I can write a wiki in 20 minutes if it means writing a real-world application, with all its complexity, deployment issues, modularity and maintainability, is made that much harder.
So my plea to the framework crowd is really this:
"Don't make easy things easy --
Make hard things easy."
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