Too many framework developers decide they’re going to be too clever by half. As a result, writing plugins, extensions, modules, templates, models, views, controllers, classes, procedures, whatever you call them is always a unique experience.

My rant about ORM (and templating) tools was one part of this. Writing records to a database is not rocket science. But learning the way tools want you to do it sometimes is. I realize there is sometimes complexity that it is trying to hide, but don’t. That’s what I’m talking about with magic.

It’s okay to use an abstraction layer. It’s even okay to use an ORM if you really feel like it. But I should be able to quickly trace my code’s path and debug what’s happening. Even if (most like) it isn’t your (the framework designer’s) code, it’s mine. At least I won’t spend all day pointing my finger at you.

But the truth is, chances are, I’m going to have to work around your framework, or customize it, or optimize it, or put in some ugly hack at some point. If you’re too clever by half, I’m going to (incorrectly) assume your framework can’t handle it, and throw it out. The cdbaby story on Oreillynet.com comes to mind.

Writing records to a database, or alternately using a cache, marking the cache dirty when appropriate, and using either a file-based or in-memory (local or remote) cache isn’t rocket science either. But if I don’t know how you’re doing it, I can’t poke around and figure out that it was my stupid configuration and not your brilliant framework at fault.

In summary, if I look at (to continue my example) a persistence class, it should look like something I’m familiar with. I’m aware that there are more techniques and idioms than one man can be aware of, but it seems too many people go out of their way to create their own.

I understand the desire to “do it the way you’ve always wanted to” — that’s a huge part of the open source itch. I’m guilty of it myself. But so many people just have such bad style. Or maybe I just can’t recognise good style when I see it. You probably won’t when you look at my framework and the new way I code.

Rails created whole new idioms and even rewrote (by dynamic class overloading) some of Ruby’s semantics, but they could do that because there wasn’t really anyone using Ruby at the time, so the syntax, coding style, and language idioms were practically up for grabs, as far as the larger programming community was concerned.

People (including me) were tolerant of learning Rails idioms (including ActiveRecord) because we were learning a new language anyway. But while some things (like ActiveRecord) had pretty good style; others, like routes, had a smell from the start. It’s often dismissed by humble programmers as “just not getting it” — but lots of people “just didn’t get” EJBs for years before the switch was flipped and suddenly everyone admitted that it was just a bad design from the start.

Another part of leveraging existing knowledge and techniques is using existing tools. I deliberately left that out, because I don’t always think its best. If you use an existing crappy library, the flavor will spread through your code, but things like loggers, unit tests, etc. have such entrenched methods, that while your annotation-based AOP injected distributed transactional logger is just going to confuse people — oh wait, that sounds like the standard way of doing things in Javaland these days.

You might be nodding your head and thinking “design patterns” but that’s NOT what I’m talking about. Design patterns, for the most part are something people talk about who want to sound smarter than everyone else. If only people who think they’re smarter than everyone else are going to work on your framework, fine — sprinkle some decorators and anti-singletons, and whatnot around and be sure to use those big words in your documentation. But design patterns are really things like arches and dormer windows, and I don’t think that has anything to do with web frameworks, and come to think of it, I can’t think of anything that arches and dormer windows have in common, except they’re parts of buildings, and neither one of them is really a pattern.