Talk:Framework

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Contents 1 Not just software! 2 General 3 Headers 4 Disambiguation please 5 Cons of frameworks? 6 IDE? 7 merged to Software framework

[edit] Not just software!

This is linked to from some Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics contexts. I've tried to structure the article accordingly. Most software articles linking here should probably link to Software framework instead. This is related to my merge (talked about below) --Ian Bailey 17:18, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] General

I suggest that this article is moved to something like Software Framework or Development Framework. It has barely something in common with the actual meaning of the word framework. The word framework deserves a more precise explanation than just jumping onto technological and marketing terms. --Retrakker 06:53, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (January 2007)

Wait so a framework is simply providing a user w ith libraries and APIs to simply code in a language? Then that means Java is a framework right? --Bash 20:00, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

I am not convinced that a software development framework is conceptually different from a framework in other contexts. There seems to be some complaint in the computing world that "framework" as a term is overused, but only if you arbitrarily decide that the term _has_ to mean something more specific. Who decided that? I think the phrase "software project" here is close, but could wrongly imply a finished application and not a library or specification. Java has a "collections framework", which I think is a valid title. It provides a set of interfaces and abstract classes that can be used as a starting point for your own collection data structures. This isn't even a distinct software project but a library and specification.

--

[edit] Headers

Just re-added the Examples header that I removed after reading Mokhov's note; however, kept Introduction removed because articles should just have an introductory paragraph that is not labelled with an Introduction header.

Any other headers can, of course, be added as the work progresses. – Mipadi 14:28, August 12, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Disambiguation please

I would really appreciate someone explaining the differences between these terms:

• Framework
• Application framework
• Software framework

In particular, is an application framework just one part (the libraries/classes) of a general framework?

And the term framework: is it roughly the same thing as "environment"?

Callum85 11:33, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

I like the definition from http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,289893,sid9_gci1103696,00.html : "In general, a framework is a real or conceptual structure intended to serve as a support or guide for the building of something that expands the structure into something useful."

So, in software, a framework is how you think about a problem and the set of subroutine libraries and APIs are an implementation of that way of thinking about the problem. This is not the same as "environment" -- the framework describes how to think about the environment.

Frameworks have a tendency to hide some of the details where knowledge of those details can lead to more performant code. Register allocation is a good example. Humans can write very tight code if they do their own register allocation. Humans can design elaborate protocols to perform extremely good register allocation across multiple subroutine libraries. But, creating a framework involving a stack, heap, and variables whose location is not explicitly specified by the developer is a reasonable tradeoff. Chuck Simmons 20:57, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I also liked the definition from techtarget.com and we can conclued, that there are many others frameworks in the world (as construction, periodic table of the chemical elements etc and in future wikipedia could provide separate overview about frameworks in general and software frameworks in specirifics.

[edit] Cons of frameworks?

I don't know if this holds true for all web MVC frameworks, but it seems that not only do they cause code bloat, it also generates tag soup or non-semantic XHTML (i.e. divitus, meaningless heaps of divs and spans with class names instead of using what XHTML elements are available). If this is true, I think it would be worth mentioning. -Matt 04:56, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] IDE?

This page has a category of Integrated development environments. Is this category appropriate? Kiore 22:12, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] merged to Software framework

there was a lot of duplication between this page and Software framework, and since this page mentioned software specifically, I merged most of this article over there, leaving the general framework bits behind.

I did drop a lot of the link spam in the process, but I don't really see that as a bad thing. Ian Bailey 04:58, 11 April 2007 (UTC)