Frameworks give us structure. Structure is essential for building large and scalable applications. We need structure to manage code, create flexible architecture, reuse functional components and enforce separation of concerns. JS Frameworks are, partly, a result of a long stagnation in JS as a language and as an ecosystem. The historical background for the rise of JS frameworks has two key points: 0. The role JS played as a small language which was used to do tasks such as forms-validation and date-selection; and its quick rise in popularity, largely due to introduction of more powerful browsers. This created a big gap between the urgent need for new JS code and available tools. Quickly new tools and frameworks started to pop up to close that gap. 0. The rapid decline we are seeing in recent years in server-side rendering, and the rapid incline in single-page apps. The paradigm of rich clients and lean servers has been successful both because it reduces server-side costs and complexity; and because it creates a better user experience. JS developers, historically, lack the education needed for such development of complex apps; which made frameworks a necessity. There is an abundance of people who can write some JS code. A subset of them is capable of writing a small single-page app. A subset of those can write a medium sized single-page app. And of those, even less can work in a team which produces a large single-page app. Frameworks make those subsets of people larger. They facilitate communication, encourage separation of concerns, and exchange the need to holistically understand all the integral parts of a web app, with technical knowledge of the framework itself. There's another subset - the subset of people who truly understand the problems needed to be solved in order to develop a web app. Here, frameworks actually reduce the size of that subset. When using a framework, it's not as needed to understand the underlying problems and structure, as it is without a framework. One of the base assumptions of frameworks is that we, developers, need structure to be enforced externally. Structure is good. When it’s a natural part of our design process it's even better. But it can be painful when our design is forced to fit a pre-determined structure. There are many types of web applications. Some of them have similarities and some of them are unique. Some share a similar structure and some are completely new and innovative. In all frameworks there’s a right way to do things and all other ways are wrong. You will know when your way is wrong because the framework will fight you back into the right way. But what if it doesn’t suit your needs or your style? There is no one-to-one correspondence between business logic and code structure. There are many code designs which can achieve the same functionality. Some more elegant than others, some more efficient than others and some more maintainable than others. When limiting code design options we inhibit developers' ability to implement business logic. The recent proliferation of frameworks makes things more difficult. Each framework introduces its own right way of building web applications; and we, developers, need to be able to select among them the one that mostly suits our needs and personal (or corporate) flavors. Often, without knowing how the framework abstracts and solves the underlying problems. We learn the framework's language, framework paradigms and patterns and how to solve framework problems. Abstraction is good. Separation of concerns is great. But this kind of abstraction has a dangerous pitfall - it reduces understanding of whatever it abstracts and increases dependency in a specific solution. It's hard to atomically upgrade / replace a component when your smallest atomic component (the framework) encompasses your entire app. Recently we have seen a move in the JS ecosystem towards smaller tools which do one thing ([*dotadiw*][1]). Developers today start to move away from a complete framework solution, towards picking the right tools for the job; essentially creating their own ad-hoc framework. This, I suspect, stems from several reasons: 1. An awakening of JS as a language. A lot of attention has been given lately into educating developers of best practices, JS programming patterns and standardization. Framework-created domain specific languages are becoming less useful and quickly obsolete. 2. A better understanding of the JS community, as a whole, of the main problems needed to be solved when developing apps. The community has educated itself to define and isolate challenges; and, naturally, *dotadiw*-style solutions have emerged. With an increased awareness of how to define and isolate problems, I believe frameworks can be detrimental. My contention is that by understanding what frameworks try to solve (which is something every experienced developer should try to understand), their existence becomes redundant, and even detrimental. Detrimental because by solving several problems all at once, they obscure the border of where one problem starts and another ends. I.e. people think that UI data binding is an automatic process which makes the UI update whenever the data model changes (I'm looking at you Angular). But those are actually two separate problems: (1) having the UI reflect some data model (data binding), and (2) getting notified when data changes (data observation). A similar confusion exists for UI routing and URL updating, which often go hand in hand under the umbrella of "routing". But again, those are actually two separate things. Routing is simply the transition between application states in response to some instruction. Usually this instruction comes from the user (in which case we may want to update the URL), or from an external URL change. All those "right ways" share a few things in common. They try to redefine the problems of web development in their own terms; and tell us how to write components, how to manage dependencies, how user interactions should be modeled, how data synchronization with the server should be done, how application state should be represented, how the three aspects of UIs (layout, styles and logic) should be managed, etc. So what are the essential components of every web framework? What does a framework solve for us? It's up to your specific application really. But since most frameworks are designed to support a broad range of applications, they will usually need to define: - What is the way by which modules are defined and loaded (from the markup, programmatically, as a mix of markup and code, as separate files, etc). - What are the possible types of components and what kinds of functionality they provide (controllers, models, factories, services, providers, widgets, etc.). - How components communicate and share data (scopes, events, pub/sub, API, etc.). - What are the ways to manage UI rendering, business logic and data. - How do we link between routes, state and view. - How does data flow between the server and the components. - How should data be accessed. - How should the app be tested. - How should the app be built. This more or less corresponds to the requirements of most modern web applications: - Loading assets and dependencies. - Modularizing code in a maintainable way. - Data channels between different parts of the app. - Communication channels between different modules. - UI rendering, templating and data binding. - Routing. - Communication with a server (AJAX, Web Sockets, etc.). - Building and testing the application. Each of those points has a selection of tools available from the open source community, which solve this point exclusively. Mixing and matching those tools allow us to build our own ad-hoc framework. This way, the atomic dependencies of our app are smaller (and thus easier to replace or upgrade) and likely of better quality than their equivalent in some framework. There is also, in the long term, less to learn and re-learn. Learning about tools, and what they solve, creates a broader knowledge base which is more applicable for the future. By giving up monolithic frameworks in favor of composed ad-hoc ones, we are gaining all the advantages of managed and compatible apps, without disadvantages such as depending on a specific technology, difficulty in isolating problems and bugs, inability to use tools which are not compatible with the framework; but most importantly - we gain back the freedom in deciding our own design and architecture. In conclusion - unlike the early days of web development, today's JS apps are much richer and more complex. Frameworks have helped us to manage and control this complexity. But they have also taken us away from the real problems we were trying to solve, obscured the borders between them, and created new problems in their own domain. Today the ecosystem is mature enough, and provides us with specific tools to specific problems. We, as developers, need to know what it is we are trying to solve, and adapt the philosophy of composing specific solutions to specific problems. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Do_One_Thing_and_Do_It_Well "Do one thing and do it well"