What is the purpose of a web framework? [closed]

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I've read the Wikipedia page, but I don't really have a "big picture" understanding.

Could anyone give me an overview and potential applications?

Answer 1

Frameworks are like incomplete / partial applications. They solve most of trivial tasks for you and allow you to focus on business logic directly. You stuff your business logic into it to make it complete.

For example, web frameworks like Spring or Struts, solve most of the request / response related trivial tasks like getting parameters from a request and populating model beans from it, rendering responses depend on model values, security, request dispatching etc. So you can utilize these structures to quickly develop applications.

Answer 2

Web frameworks help you to decrease an application developing time.

The most popular frameworks, prepare your project to follow a Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, dividing the classes function. This could be Zend Framework in PHP or Spring MVC in java

In other cases, some frameworks help you in a specific layer of your MVC project, like JPA or Hibernate (persistance layer) help you to map your tables into classes, obviously this speeds up a lot your developing time but at its cost.

You have to be very careful, because in some cases, frameworks can be left with no support, so the best choice is to use or follow popular or standarized frameworks.

Answer 3

At the simplest, a framework is an implementation of Design Patterns. Struts is a web framework. It is an implementation of the MVC design pattern. JPA (applicable to web and desktop) is an implementation of ORM Design Pattern.