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John Colagioia (he/him)
John Colagioia (he/him)

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Frameworks of the Future?

Something has been nagging me in the back of my mind for a while: Where are the "modern" web frameworks?

What I mean is that---apologies for the history lesson---once Ruby on Rails got its footing, it did enough that it changed how web development happen. Web applications in the 1990s was a nightmare, hacking everything together through CGI and session variables, which didn't substantially change until Rails.

Today, most of that mess is just how you threaten children to behave, because everybody else now has their equivalent to Rails. C#/VB.NET's ASP.NET, Elixir's Phoenix, Go's Beego, PHP's Laravel, Haskell's IHP, Java's Jakarta EE, JavaScript's Express, and literally dozens of others now have effective parity with Rails.

I was also struck by a coincidence: I picked up Rails about fourteen years ago, and wrote my first (awful) web application about fourteen years before that, and yes, I'm really that old...But that triggered the question. If web development in 1993 looked like it would in 2007 (except for still-obscure Rails), and Rails looked like web development today, is there a framework out there that has all the features that we'll demand as necessary in 2035?

I'm not looking for the overthrow of CRUD-through-MVC. Rather, Hobo and Hoodie seemed like advances---Hobo was sort of Rails for Rails, and Hoodie was an offline-first framework for something like what we now call Progressive Web Apps---when I tried them early in their life-cycle, but both seem to have withered away. And nobody else (that I can find) seems interested in improving graphical design (as in, "just use Material Design, or Carbon, or whatever"), cleaner parent/child relationships, automatically updating views and controllers to match changes to the models, and probably features that I don't know that I need.

I asked a similar question in a different community, and the closest they came up with was the niche Apache Beam and the obligatory vague hand-waving about no-code systems. So, maybe DEV seeming to skew younger and more deliberately technical might get a better view of things? Is anybody using a "Framework of the Future" that we should all know about?

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