What are the best and worst features of your preferred web framework?

Question

The title says it all.

Answer 1

For Django, I would say my favourite features thus far are:

• Automatic admin page generation.
• Templates.
• Object relational model.
• Use of a good language (Python).

So far, I haven't found much to moan about though, except that the server does not always update properly from certain alterations (e.g. new files).

Answer 2

ASP.NET 2

Good:
c#, caching, Visual Studio, master pages, user controls, oo if you want it, metric crapload of built in classes, just so damn flexible...

Bad:
viewstate, *view controls, datasets, webforms, bloated markup by default

Answer 3

I work in 2 frameworks .NET and Ruby on Rails

ASP.NET In my opinion many of it's strengths are also it's weaknesses.

Pros

• C# - I didn't think I would, but I like this language.

• Lots of controls out of the box - Lets you build with pre-made controls very easily.

• Highly Customizable - You can extend the platform to do most anything.

• Microsoft - It's made by Microsoft so it's here to stay.

• Large marketshare - Lots of people are using it.

Cons

• Lots of controls out of the box - Pre-Built web controls make it easy to make another vanilla website.

• Highly Customizable - Once you get past the initial "Yay! I did it" stage. You realize that there is a whole lot to learn if you want to really unlock the power of the platform.

• Microsoft - I'm an open source kind of guy and I am happy that open source has made great strides with .NET in the past year. Still the core code is owned my Microsoft which means you can't see it and they can do whatever they want with it.

• Rough Edges - Sometimes the pieces don't really fit together right so you have to do things that don't always make sense. "Wait, why do I have to databind() here?"

Ruby on Rails

Pros

• Great community - The rails community really has a passion for doing things well and an eye for asthetics.

• Open source - It's all there, you can see it and you know what it's doing.

• Actively maintained - New features are added frequently, often it offers new concepts ahead of the pack.

• Built in best practices - TDD, BDD, you name it, it's built in.

• Feels Good - Can't describe this one, it's subjective I know, but it feels good.

• Plugins and Gems - Lots of cool features can be added easily

Cons

• Specialized - It's really geared toward REST and CRUD operations. Which is really awesome, usually.

• Very actively maintained - Sometimes it seems that as soon as you get your project done it's outdated because the next big thing has come along.

• Small marketshare - Not many Rails jobs out there yet.

Answer 4

Coldfusion

Pros: Easy and quick to build full applications, decent security platform right out of the box, available on almost every OS, fun to mess with, and easily customizable.

Cons: Some of the features are too easy and don't allow a lot of grainular control like ASP.net does, CFChart, and flash form features take forever to pre-compile before they get sent to browser.

Answer 5

Rails
+ convention over configuration. Follows Ruby's example - principle of least surprise
+ testability, mocking, test-data-fixtures built into the framework.
+ clean separation of concerns. MVC
+ DB Migrations. Nice.
+ code generator scripts to speed up routine tasks.
+ default 3 DBs - development, test and production
+ ActiveRecord ORM.. pretty good.

'- running tests is not as quick as I'd like
'- IDEs for windows are slow or unwieldy

Answer 6

My own toolbox (antiframework made of Werkzeug, Jinja2, WTForms, Google AppEngine)

Pros:

• full freedom of architecture and components
• python
• no clutter
• helpful community

Cons:

• proprietary platform (Google)
• little or no introductory documentation
• small community