Look at Frameworks as Just a Useful Tool
Saturday, November 24th, 2007
I’ve never really understood the argument against libraries and frameworks. They’re tools and nothing more. Perhaps they allow some to get up and rolling without fully understanding the dependent technologies but that in itself isn’t my sticking point. In some ways the abstraction can prevent the novice from creating awkward solutions for easy problems within the context of their project. Although I would suggest its important to learn the underlying language.
James Bennett wrote a great article this week titled Lets talk about frameworks (again) where he points out the difference between frameworks, libraries and snippets. I think its a must read. It offers a larger perspective, albeit not the only one, about what frameworks might or might not achieve for us as developers. The technician versus the artist. Without doubt there are many like myself who are somewhere between the poles of technician and artist.
Recently I’ve been working through Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications by Patrick Lenz. And why not? I am at the end of a Bachelor of Computing which heavily focused on Object Oriented Programming (OOP). I am an intermediate level Java Programmer in Java 2 Standard Edition and have completed work in Java 2 Micro Edition as well as C, PHP, SQL, machine and assembly code, UNIX, JavaScript and other languages. I think on the whole the leap into Ruby and then into Rails isn’t something that should be thrown back at me simply because I’ve decided to adopt a framework for a project. I have worked in web standards semantic markup for at least the last four years so have paid my dues. I would hardly describe myself as someone who just jumps into a framework as if its day one of my programming career.
So I think its wrong to slate everyone who uses a framework as getting a free ride. Maybe there are those who do get a free ride from frameworks and libraries but many of us can actually program to some extent already or worked with semantic markup and Cascading Stylesheets before picking up a framework. At least significantly enough that the framework is not a black box solution.
