Lazycoder

What do you want out of a framework?

Had an interesting discussion with blowmage (Mike Moore) over Twitter. I said that having the “param1/param2″ pattern in the ASP.NET MVC made me itchy from a security standpoint. He replied.

Eh, just don’t add them to the URL. The ASP.NET MVC assumes you know what you are doing. I’m sick of frameworks babysitting me.

I replied:

and yet you use a managed language that holds your hand and cleans up your memory for you.

Which came out a little harsher than I meant. But my gist is, isn’t a GC system babysitting you already? How much abstraction do you want out of a framework?

Bottom line is: a web application, is basically an abstraction for sending and receiving headers and HTML to/from a browser. You can dress that process up with domain models and other abstractions. But you *can* build a web application strictly using sockets if you really don’t want to be babysat.

Now that’s absolute crazy talk. No one wants to build an eCommerce site by sending packets over a pipe. That’d be a crazy as writing an operating system today using 32-bit/64-bit x86 assembly. So we accept some levels of abstraction. In fact, we embrace abstraction. Hunting down errors in a memory dump is no fun. Neither is making sure all of your string buffers are properly allocated and sized. We don’t want to have to malloc() and free() char buffers when we want to concatenate strings, so we make a StringBuilder class that handles all the nastiness for us.

It’s also not fun to get stuck in a framework that is so opinionated that when you stray from it’s primrose path you are assaulted by rabid dogs. Opinionated software is good, but a framework should allow you to inject your own opinion.

So what do you really want out of a framework. Ultimately, I think developers really want a framework that will nerf the sharp corners of the underlying hardware for us. We want to be babysat.But we also want the freedom to rip things out and route around the hard parts. And frankly, we want frameworks that work for us, not against us. It’s when the framework is working against us that we rail and rant and cry out for change.

Me? I want the full on Star Trek-Computer:write-me-a-program-that-will-let-me-sell-my-”My Little Pony”-collection-on-eBay” framework.

Feel free to leave your own thoughts below. Difficulty: No Linking to Spolskys “Leaky Abstractions”