I recently delivered a talk at FFConf in Brighton, called "You should use , it's the bestestest!". I wanted to do a write-up of the presentation's content here, hopefully so it can start a broader conversation that I think we need to have, mainly around the cost of modern frameworks on mobile devices.
designers have featuritis - developers have frameworkitis. If you didn’t use a framework, you would end up writing your own!
lol - guilty
Learning it. Re-learning it. Debugging it.
THE $64K QUESTION
So, inevitably, the question comes: “Should you use a framework?”
I can’t answer that question, because I think it’s entirely your call. There are a million and one reasons why you may feel you need to use one. But, for what it’s worth, here are my thoughts:
Frameworks contribute ideas and concepts. Frameworks are a crucial part of understanding what approaches work, and what don’t, and that ultimately drives improvements at the platform level. In that regard I think they serve as important testing grounds for the platform changes of tomorrow and let us figure things out before they become embedded in the web permanently.
Frameworks are an inversion of control. The reason I parked libraries earlier on is that you can swap them out. Frameworks, on the other hand, invert control. They control the lifecycle of the app, and give you entry points where your code runs. You’re still responsible for the final code, but you’re not in control.
Frameworks are expensive on mobile. Compared to vanilla, at least. For me, prohibitively so, but everyone has their own limits of what they’re willing to tolerate.
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It seems to me that developer ergonomics should be less important than our users’ needs.
