Comment by PommeDeTerre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PommeDeTerre | Hacker News Reader

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I think you're only looking at one side of the coin. While there may be benefits to using ORMs and web app frameworks, there are also many significant drawbacks. A lot of the time, these drawbacks can wipe out many, if not all, of the gains.

You usually end up losing a lot of flexibility when using ORMs or frameworks. If you don't do things exactly the way the ORM or framework forces you to, you'll be in a world of pain. Of course, there will always be situations where you need to customize things to your particular case. ORMs and frameworks are notorious for making this far more difficult than it should be. I've seen teams waste more time twisting a framework or ORM to handle a unique situation than it may have saved them in the first place.

It's naive to think that ORMs and frameworks necessarily have fewer bugs, or better quality, or better documentation, or more tests than custom-written code. I've worked on enough teams that have had a hell of a time due to ORM or framework bugs. It's worse when you're using a closed-source ORM or framework that you can't easily fix directly.

Somewhat related to that, for any sizable or complex application, it's just not possible to completely avoid understanding the inner working of the ORM or other frameworks that you're using. Eventually you'll need to dig into them, whether it's to fix a bug, or to figure out how to do something that's poorly documented, or perhaps to figure out performance problems. This can be very time-consuming, often exceeding the effort needed to write, debug and test custom code.

If you do need to make additions or fixes to an externally-developed ORM or framework, this can very easily cause headaches down the road when it comes to upgrading to a new version of the framework or ORM. You end up having to choose between using an old, patched version of the framework that lacks critical features or bug fixes, or you can upgrade and try to re-apply your fixes/additions, or maybe even moving to a whole new framework altogether.

Having to deal with issues like these can make custom code look very compelling.

I'd say that the main thrust of my argument could be summarized as "frameworks are good, you should use them to write apps." My observation is that often when people say they don't want to use a framework, they end up trying to write code that does similar things the framework would do, but because they're not experts in designing frameworks, they do a bad job of it. An example would be rather than using an ORM, people write some one-off database service, and then copy-and-paste and find-replace to write another one. This leads to a great deal of code duplication, and makes it difficult to fix bugs and fix performance issues (e.g., to implement a read-through cache, you'd have to go through each copy-pasted variant and implement the cache, rather than implementing it once in a base class.)

It's not that these people are writing a better framework that adapts more to their needs, it's that they read on the internet "don't use frameworks" and decided they were smarter than all those other startups that use Rails. The result is generally a pile of half-complete, poorly-conceived ideas centered around decisions that no longer make a lot of sense.

I say all this having used, seen and maintained many a homegrown framework in my time as a contract developer. I'm sure they're out there, but I've never seen a codebase that doesn't use a pre-existing framework that's better than one that does. I think if you work on a small team, it is very difficult to take the time to write a well-designed and well-tested framework in addition to your main responsibility, which is presumably to make features that users are dying to give you money to use.

You are definitely right that you can paint yourself into a corner with frameworks. I suppose my theory is that as long as you're using an open-source framework, you will always be able to code your way out of whatever situation you end up in. I also believe (but obviously cannot prove) that in nearly all of these situations, the net effect of using a framework will be a positive in terms of both your code quality and your productivity. It goes without saying that if you choose to use a crappy framework, then you're going to have problems.

To be really clear -- I didn't write "don't use frameworks".

I will happily say "Don't use megaframeworks; use microframeworks.". And, I'll add "read the code in these microframeworks, learn what they do and how they do it, and start to see ways that the different tools available to you can be assembled".

I also absolutely agree that one should not create your own (mega)framework in order to build your application. But luckily I never said that one should ;)

And, I agree with your last paragraph and can add to it: "I suppose my theory is that as long as you're using an open-source framework or collection of microframeworks,..."

In my own experience, over time the use of small, clean open-source libraries (the microframeworks) beats the hell out of the codebases built on the megaframeworks. Eventually, you have to replace something, and replacing one component among many is a hell of a lot quicker, easier, and efficient than plumbing one out of a larger, less simple, monolith.

I believe ORMs are great for something notJim mentions in his first sentence: "why not start with one?".

You lose some flexibility, you can encounter some bugs. But till you reach this point you do not have to write SQL and (hopefully) gain some development speed, at least if you find an ORM that fits your needs.

For some people who do not mess with databases every days this is IMHO great. I sadly do not remember who said it but I liked the idea "machines should be able to generate SQL much faster and more reliable than me".

I think if you really hit the limits of an ORM (one of the bigger ones) and are not experienced with databases (and SQL) you reached the point where you should look for someone who is. But if you never do and only need CRUD and some relations you can live a happy life.

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