Zen and the Art of Web Development June 20
Building applications with reusable, modular components is kind of the holy grail of software development. To be conservative let’s call it a general aspiration, and if nothing else a guiding principle of Good Design. We’ve been hearing about it since the seventies and several iterations later (OO design, Java/Struts, and more recently, the growing number of web frameworks such as RoR, CakePHP, Zend, etc.) we’re just starting to feel the impact on large scale distributed applications that are becoming the hallmark of this strange collective trip that is the early 21st century landscape of social computing.
While we like to think of ourselves as a pretty savvy bunch, we at Reflexions have been admittedly a little slow in jumping on the framework bandwagon over the last few years. Maybe it’s the control-freak mindset that comes with building custom apps, or maybe we just haven’t found the right fit. Whatever the reason, we’ve finally started to embrace the framework philosophy by doing what any other group of control freaks would do: we’ve built our own. More on that in a future post.
What’s struck me about building a framework is that in doing so one engages in the zen-like exercise of modeling one’s own notions of how applications exist and interact with their underlying components. [...]
