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Comment by sanswork | Hacker News Reader

I think you are thinking too small. For most small sites I agree that frameworks are overkill but once you get past that they become nearly essential to maintaining your code.

Running a web app with even over 10KLOC without some sort of framework in place sounds like a receipt for disaster. Also frameworks do not mean you have to have code generate all your queries or stick another templating language over php.

If you've never had to write or maintain a complex web application than I can understand your position but once you do I'm certain you'll change your mind.

Also saying web development is easy compared to other fields shows a lack of understanding of the complexity of large web based applications. I've worked in a number of fields and I now focus on web development and for the most part they were all about the same complexity.

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I totally disagree. And I've made complex web apps since when CGIs in C where the only way to have dynamic generated content.

In fact I think it is the contrary: for small sites (and small budgets) frameworks can be ok. For big websites custom code is a must.

The idea that using a framework makes code easier to maintain is the complete opposite of my experience.

Big (serious) projects require a lot of custom logic which you should write yourself anyway. And it is a lot more painful since you have to stick to the framework logic if you don't want to break things as soon as you update the framework version or if you don't want to make the code unmaintainable.

I have made my own libraries which are designed in a modular fashion (not OO) that I constantly improve and reuse. Code is clean and you can easily understand the flow of each section.

A MVC framework is not the only way to have clean (modular) code.

Your reasoning would apply if you aren't good at designing software architecture, which is a recipe for disaster especially on big projects.

I'm not saying MVC is the only way. I've not even mentioned MVC. What I gather though is that when you hear someone mention frameworks you assume they are referring to the railish frameworks of recent. A framework to me is a set of libraries and a structure to better layout and facilitate the development of your application.

It also doesn't have to be a premade/3rd party one as you've demonstrated by essentially creating your own framework and just calling it by a different name(collection of libraries).

A recipe for disaster in my opinion would be a large project with no code structure/layout guidelines.

In this case, of course, I agree.

The term framework is almost exclusively used for object oriented designs. That's what I was arguing against.

Of course one should make, use and keep improving his own libraries.

And there's nothing wrong in using other people code either. Provided that it is built in a modular standalone fashion and so it can be easily included / replaced / updated / removed without breaking things.

I accidentally downmodded you, but agree completely with your comment.

Totally agree with you.

When me and my buddies are working on new (hobby) projects, we usually do our quick prototyping using something like CodeIgniter. It's fast and lets us have something out within hours vs. days.

A lot of these frameworks have super simple tie-ins to other APIs, so we can easily include the Google Maps API, Twitter, etc within a few seconds. Now the app isn't going to be very efficient or scalable but it's something that we can play with and then build the final product off of.

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