55 Great Web Development Frameworks
Web Development Framework is software designed to support and increase the efficiency of the development of a Websites, Web applications and Web services. Many frameworks provide libraries for database access, templating and session management, and they often promote code reuse. Web development can be tough – not only you have to code business logic, but you also have to do database work, user interface design, user experience design CSS, HTML, etc. and then the code needs to be secure, stable and able to cope with high load.
In this article I give you an overview of some of the best Web Development Frameworks. I really hope you find some of them useful as using frameworks may get you much faster to market and with an improved product.
PHP
Evocore
The Evocore framework distinguishes itself by the fact it doesn’t require PHP 5 to work! As of early 2010, Evocore will still work perfectly under PHP 4 in order to guarantee your applications can be hosted on virtually any web hosting provider, including low cost cheap web hosting plans.
PHOCOA
PHOCOA’s primary intent is to make web application development in PHP easier, faster, and higher-quality. The framework handles most of the “dirty work” of web application development by providing infrastructure for all of the common tasks.
Cake PhP
CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.
Kohana
Kohana is a fork of CodeIgniter intended to work only with PHP 5. Kohana is completely community driven and every modification is thoroughly discussed and vetted with in the community.All the positive aspects of CI carry over here except that the documentation can be relatively lacking. However it has a thriving community behind it you can turn to if you run into errors.
Solar
It is fully name-spaced and uses enterprise application design patterns, with built-in support for localization and configuration at all levels. The code base itself is easy to comprehend, adheres to well-documented naming conventions, and exhibits strong conceptual integrity.
BlueShoes
BlueShoes is a comprehensive application framework and content management system. It is written in the widely used web-scripting language PHP. BlueShoes offers excellent support for the popular MySQL database as well as support for Oracle and MSSQL.
Limb3
Limb3 is an OpenSource(LGPL) Library of Interdependent Modules and Blocks mostly aimed for rapid web application prototyping and development with PHP5.
Maintainable
A base around the Model-View-Controller pattern and is modeled after Ruby on Rails. Like any framework, it’s certainly not appropriate for every application. The framework provides a comprehensive test suite to get you on the right track setting up tests.
Qcodo
The Qcodo Development Framework is an open-source PHP framework that focuses on freeing developers from unnecessary tedious, mundane coding. Qcodo enables some the most highly trafficked websites and data intensive applications for companies like Lockheed Martin and Hewlett-Packard, large organizations like Stanford School of Medicine, Academy of Country Music and NASA, and startups like Chess.com and Uloop.
AjaxAC
AjaxAC is an open-source framework written in PHP, used to develop/create/generate AJAX applications. The fundamental idea behind AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) is to use the XMLHttpRequest object to change a web page state using background HTTP sub-requests without reloading the entire page. It is released under the terms of the Apache License v2.0.
Phpmvc
PhpMVC implements the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern, and encourages application design based on the Model 2 paradigm. This design model allows the Web page or other contents (View) to be mostly separated from the internal application code (Controller/Model), making it easier for designers and programmers to focus on their respective areas of expertise.
Zoop Framework
It predates the recent proliferation of PHP frameworks, based on solid MVC principles, including separation of display, logic, and data layers. It’s designed to be efficient, modular, and extensible, striking a balance between lightweight and fully-featured.
Seagull
Seagull is a mature OOP framework for building web, command line and GUI applications. Licensed under BSD, the project allows PHP developers to easily integrate and manage code resources, and build complex applications quickly.
Zend
Zend framework is more of a glue framework in that things aren’t as tightly coupled as in other frameworks like RoR . As such it also gives you a lot more control.This framework boasts of one of the most complete collection of utility classes to leverage in your application. But since this is a collection of classes than a proper framework, you’ll be looking at lots of configuration to make it work. If you are thinking of starting off as a PHP programmer, this isn’t the first framework you should try.Having said that, it has excellent documentation and a very large community behind it.
PRADO
PRADO is a component-based and event-driven programming framework for developing Web applications in PHP 5. PRADO stands for PHP Rapid Application Development Object-oriented.
Symfony
Symfony is a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP. It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise.
Akelos PHP
Akelos PHP Framework is a web application development platform based on the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern. Based on good practices, it allows you to: Write views using Ajax easily, Control requests and responses through a controller, Manage internationalized applications, Communicate models and the database using simple conventions.
CodeIgniter
CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks.
CSS
Logic CSS
The Logic CSS framework is a collection of CSS files and a toolset designed to cut development times for web-standards compliant web layouts and templates. Main features: Common cross-browser rendering behavior approach (not a reset), Beautiful font stacks, Typography with text resizing capabilities and vertical baseline/rhythm, Three totally flexible layout grid templates, customizable with the toolset, Elastic layout using EMs, Liquid layout with percentages, Fixed layout using pixel dimensions.
Fluid 960 Grid System
The Fluid 960 Grid System templates have been built upon the work of Nathan Smith and his 960 Grid System using effects from the MooTools and jQuery JavaScript libraries. Awesome!
1kbgrid
CSS grid (loosely based on Nathan Smith’s 960 Grid System). Its mission is to be lightweight.
The Golden Grid
A CSS Framework integrating various CSS construction techniques like floats, absolute positioning, complete freedom of your default width, extra usability with em based grid system plus possibility of fluid columns and extra % based grid system and many more features.
Elasticss
A simple css framework to layout web-based interfaces.
Malo
Malo is ultra small css library for building web sites. It is meant to be structural base for small or medium web sites. Malo derives Emastic CSS Framework.
BlueTrip
BlueTrip gives you a sensible set of styles and a common way to build a website so that you can skip past the grunt work and get right to designing.
SenCSs
SenCSs isn’t a framework like other CSS frameworks. It doesn’t include a layout system littered with silly classes and pre-set grids, so what does SenCSs do for you? SenCSs does everything else: baseline, fonts, paddings, margins, tables, lists, headers, blockquotes, forms and more.
960 Grid System
960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.
ContentWithStyle
A CSS framework that aims to not only give you a framework for your overall design, but also for typography and more in-depth design elements. There are six different layouts included with CWS, including vertical navigation with one content column, vertical navigation with two content columns, and horizontal navigation with two columns of content. CWS also focuses on semantic markup, including naming conventions for the basic building blocks of the six layouts. It changes the structure of how pages are laid out to make more important content show up first in the code (header, main content, sub content, local nav, etc.
Blueprint
Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.
Elements
Elements is a down to earth CSS framework. It was built to help designers write CSS faster and more efficient. Elements goes beyond being just a framework, it’s its own project workflow. It has everything you need to complete your project, which makes you and your clients happy.
Tripoli
Tripoli is a generic CSS standard for HTML rendering. By resetting and rebuilding browser standards, Tripoli forms a stable, cross-browser rendering foundation for your web projects. Tripoli completely resets all default browser standards and rebuilds them quietly with modern web development in mind. Tripoli is not a CSS framework.
52framework
52framework contains all the header, nav, section, article, footer tags which are the basic html5 tags, with full documentation and growing community this frameworks looks promising. Features like rounded corners, text-shadow, box-shadow, html5 markup, grid system, css reset are just a small list, this framework is worth a look if you want to dive in HTML5 and CSS3.
JAVASCRIPT
JavaScriptMVC
An open-source framework containing the best ideas in enterprise JavaScript development. It guides you to successfully completed projects by promoting best practices, maintainability, and convention over configuration.
jQuery
A fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.
MooTools
Mootools presents itself as the ideal solution for the intermediate to advanced programmer. It focuses on JavaScript as a language and extends on it as much as possible.It provides a robust class creation system just like Prototype and just like the others, it provides a coherent API for all the functionality it provides.The documentation can be pretty lacking at times but the active community more than makes up for it.
Yahoo UI library
Yahoo UI library is a Swiss army kind of a library in that it provides a complete set of features and widgets letting you build the application you want to build. It is built by the developers at Yahoo itself.In YUI, the core library contains all the essential elements including DOM traversal and CSS manipulation while the utilities and widgets are optional and are available separately.
Dojo
Dojo is yet another JS toolkit which provides everything that you’d expect from a modern JS library including a selector engine, AJAX integration and so on.It also provides a set of rich interface elements and a number of advanced features like persistent connections and offline storage. Dojo has very thorough documentation and a thriving community.
Ext JS
Ext JS is a cross-browser JavaScript library for building rich internet applications. It includes: High performance, customizable UI widgets, Well designed and extensible Component model, An intuitive, easy to use API.
UIZE
UIZE has lots of built-in widgets: slideshow, calendar, date picker, slider, marquee, dialog, menu, mag view, etc. UIZE offers many powerful features: JavaScript Animation, JavaScript Inheritance, JavaScript Events, JavaScript Modules, JavaScript Libraries, JavaScript Templates, JavaScript Widgets, JavaScript Localization, JavaScript Documentation, JavaScript Code Compression, JavaScript Build Scripts.
Archetype
Archetype provides a wide range of possibility and options, but the framework uses a convention over configuration system : use the convention, it’s so easy to use.
Qooxdoo
Qooxdoo is a comprehensive and innovative framework for creating rich internet applications (RIAs). Leveraging object-oriented JavaScript allows developers to build impressive cross-browser applications. No HTML, CSS nor DOM knowledge is needed
Fleegix.js
Fleegix.js has an excellent “events system” that helps you listen, manipulate, and fire off DOM event (such as mouseover’s, onclick, etc.). It includes a function for serializing JavaScript objects into JSON format.
PHYTON
Djangoproject
Django ships with an extensive library containing tools for caching, serialization, authentication. It even provides a simple administrative interface based on your models and controllers. Its URL rewriting mechanism is a little different in that it uses regular expression to resolve which controller it needs to use. It has extremely thorough documentation to back it up along with a helpful, polite community. A beginner Python programmer will take to Django very easily.
Pylonshq
Similar to Zend, this is a very loosely coupled framework which glues a number of third party libraries to provide functionality.In Pylons, each and every aspect can be switched out with the one you like. Everything from it templating language to its ORM can be switched out with minimal fuss.With respect to features, it depends directly on the individual components you pick for your project. Documentation can be relatively lacking and the community is a little smaller too
CherryPy
CherryPy is a pythonic, object-oriented HTTP framework. CherryPy allows developers to build web applications in much the same way they would build any other object-oriented Python program. This results in smaller source code developed in less time.
Web2py
Web2py Enterprise Web Framework Free and open source full-stack enterprise framework for agile development of fast, scalable, secure and portable database-driven web-based applications. Written and programmable in Python.
Mako
Mako’s syntax and API borrows from the best ideas of many others, including Django templates, Cheetah, Myghty, and Genshi.
RUBY
Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails is a framework for the Ruby platform and was created by David Hansson whilst creating Basecamp for 37Signals. Ruby on Rails has gained incredible growth ever since it was released.RoR uses the MVC pattern and provides a number of features including a complete ORM, scaffolding and URL rewriting. Ruby, by default, uses Prototype as it’s JavaScript library.Ruby’s incredible growth can be attributed to ease of development and rich feature set. Configuration is generally minimal to nothing. It has good documentation and a growing community.
Merb
Merb is an MVC framework that is ORM-agnostic, JavaScript library agnostic, and template language agnostic, preferring plugins that add in support for a particular feature rather than trying to produce a monolithic library with everything in the core.
Padrino
Padrino is a ruby framework built upon the excellent Sinatra Microframework. Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating simple web applications in Ruby. Padrino was created to make it fun and easy to code.
Java
Apache Wicket
Apache Wicket is a lightweight component based web application framework for the Java programming language. Wicket is patterned after stateful GUI frameworks. It features trees of components that use listener delegates to react to HTTP requests against links and forms. With XHTML for templates it separate presentation and business logic and allows templates to be edited with conventional WYSIWYG design tools. Within the framework each component is backed by its own model that represents the state of the components. Wicket might be the best framework for making use of your developers resources.
Rife
Rife is a full-stack web application framework with tools and APIs to implement most common web features. Each of its toolkits is usable by itself and together they offer powerful integrated features that boost your productivity. RIFE ensures that every declaration and definition is handled in one place in the code. This simplifies the developer’s task by reducing code replication, enforcing consistency, and easing maintenance.
Seam
A powerful open source development platform for building rich Internet applications in Java. Seam integrates technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), JavaServer Faces (JSF), Java Persistence (JPA), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB 3.0) and Business Process Management (BPM) into a unified full-stack solution, complete with sophisticated tooling.
Google Web Toolkit
GWT is a Java software development framework that allows web developers to build and maintain complex Javascript front-end applications in Java. The web development framework makes it easy for developers to write AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail. Other than a few native libraries, everything is Java source that can be built on any supported platform with the included GWT Ant build files. GWT focuses on reusable, efficient solutions for asynchronous remote procedure calls, Internationalization, history management, bookmarking and cross-browser portability. It allows developers to develop and debug AJAX applications in the Java language with any Java development tools of their choice. However, due to lack of modularity in JavaScript, sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components becomes a hassle.
OpenXava
A productive way for creating AJAX Enterprise Applications with Java. Indeed, it’s faster developing with OpenXava than with Ruby On Rails, Spring MVC, or any other MVC framework. This is because in OpenXava you only have to write the Model. The Controllers are reused, and the View are generated automatically.
