Communications of the ACM

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Application Frameworks

By Chris Nokleberg, Brad Hawkes
Communications of the ACM, July 2021, Vol. 64 No. 7, Pages 42-49
10.1145/3446796
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Shared libraries encourage code reuse, promote consistency across teams, and ultimately improve product velocity and quality. But application developers are still left to choose the right libraries, figure out how to correctly configure them, and wire everything together. By preinstalling and preconfiguring libraries, application frameworks provide a simplified developer experience and even greater consistency, albeit at the cost of some flexibility.

By owning the entire application life cycle, frameworks go beyond a mere collection of libraries. Guaranteed framework behavior can scale development—for example, by avoiding the need for in-depth security or privacy code reviews of every application. The cross-team and cross-language consistency provided by frameworks is also a necessary foundation for higher-level automation and smart systems.

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