Anything beyond that, such as input data parsing or generating HTML from a template or tree, should be a library, not a "framework". You might want multiple libraries from different sources.
Django.
And the reasons for that are:
- choosing tools takes time and resources. - integrating them takes time and resources.
- keep up to update the stack so it works well together takes time and resources.
- multiple tools mean multiple docs.
- you need to train your newcomers to your whole whole stack.
- when you change project, you have to learn a new stack.
- multiple tools won't be nearly as well integrated or full featured than the big framework. Have you tried flask-admin ? It's very far away from django-admin.
- ecosystems build on common grounds. They assume they have tools, configurations, conventions. If you just use anything and everything, no third party tool car easily fit in your stack. E.G: django has a lot of nice libs around authentication because 3rd parties can rely on having a central User model. It's terribly unperfect, but it's really productive.
- JS has this philosophy, and it's a terrible horrible no good messy pain.
On npm, expesss had 538,945 downloads in the last day https://www.npmjs.com/package/express
http://blog.builtinnode.com/post/most-installed-packages-acc... "Express is a very popular package with 160,809,503 downloads so far. It has a very steady growth, peaking in March with a little over 12 million downloads."
Express was released November 16, 2010; Django was released July 21st 2005.
https://trends.builtwith.com/framework shows PHP with 53 million sites, Express with 217K, and Django right under Visual Studio (wat) and ColdFusion with 59k.
It really depends on what you're trying to do. Because so many JS frameworks for the browser integrate so nicely with Node, you can use stuff like Axios on both ends and only learn one API. Meteor is even nicer in this (write models once and use on both ends).
There is no one way framework or paradigm that can be the past, present and future. There are always multiple of them.