Reminds me of an earlier article I pointed to. It’s starting to smell like there is a definite trend to moving away from the giant monolithic MVC frameworks like Rails and to breaking up your code into a domain backend exposing itself to client applications via API.
Why? I think it probably has to do with many things.
- Exposing a public API is all the rage by letting other devs build value for you. (See google rant)
- Multiple platforms. Pretty much any web company these days needs some mobile app. The only sensible way to build this is retrieving your data via a central API to talk to.
- Javascript/Coffeescript is no toy language to sprinkle some effects on your web page anymore. We are starting to see so much javascript/AJAX functionality on the web these days that there are all sorts of frameworks popping up to organize this code. If there is so much logic on the client side it starts to question the need for layers like controllers and even views when you have client-side routers, controllers, templates, views, and models that could all be talking to your RESTful API.
So where do you turn for a web framework if not the monolithic MVC giants? I tend to think we’ll see a renaissance of RESTful route focused frameworks like sinatra, express, or flask mixed with a client side js framework (see above). If the application is light-weight enough the client side framework can even be talking directly to a RESTful API provided by the database itself.
