I was reading one of my favorite blogs again, Todd Hoff’s High Scalability. He has an interesting weekly post format called “Quotable Quotes”. I like them because they’re often choice quotes that highlight some larger truth.
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1. Chasing bloody frameworks
One that caught my eye was this one by Sandro Mancuso:
I hate all these bloody Java frameworks. Why devs keep using them? No, you won’t die if you write some code yourself. #accidentalcomplexity
— Sandro Mancuso (@sandromancuso) October 20, 2015
Frameworks are bad? Aren’t these the foundation of reusable code? Can we build for the web without Ruby’s Rails, PHP’s Laravel or Java’s Spring?
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2. Architecture purity or bloat?
Luckily the conversation remained civil. The other side of the isle piped up with practicality. I think Jeff is saying “Hey we gotta get our jobs done.”
@sandromancuso 4 some, life has higher priorities than the purity of their work's software architecture. @joescii's? Crimson Tide Football.
— Jeff Maxwell (@jeffreymaxwell) October 20, 2015
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3. Look Ma No Frameworks
Then Pablo Chacin jumps in with his slideshare deck, rejecting Frameworks as hugely wastful.
. @sandromancuso I recently made a presentation titled "look ma, no frameworks!! " XD cc @ignasi35
— Pablo Chacin (@pablochacin) October 20, 2015
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4. Beware the ORM
Anyone who’s a regular reader of this blog knows that I’ve railed on against ORM’s for a long time. These are object relational mappers, they are a library on to of a relational database. They allow developers to build software, without mucking around in SQL.
@sandromancuso I say yes to frameworks like netty, guice play, say no to all J2EE stuff like hibernate, spring.
— stevesun21 (@stevesun21) October 27, 2015
Hibernate is a famous one. I remember back in the late 90’s I was brought on to fix some terrible performance problems. At root the problem was the SQL code. It wasn’t being written by their team & tuned carefully. It was written en mass & horribly by this Hibernate library.
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5. Where’s the oversight?
Perhaps the biggest risk to many startups is that the decision isn’t being made at all. What do I mean by this?
@sandromancuso @KevlinHenney remember to generalise! You need lots of abstract classes so you look smart!
— Guido Schuh (@moolder) October 20, 2015
I think this tweet gets to the heart of it. Often the decision to use a framework or not is simply hidden in plain sight, an assumption albeit a large one, that this is how you build software.
But these decisions are so fundamental because once your scaffolding is built, it becomes very hard to disentangle. Rip & replace becomes terribly expensive, and scalability becomes a painful unattainable dream.
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