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WHAT ARE WEB APPLICATION FRAMEWORKS AND HOW ARE THEY USED?
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technologies. Then in 2005 there was a boom of Ruby. Everyone was amazed with the elegance
of this programming language; and Ruby on Rails, the central piece of software ever written in
Ruby, was claimed to be the ultimate web applications framework. Soon clones of Ruby on Rails
began popping out. That’s how Python’s Django and Turbogears, as well as all PHP frameworks
were born.
In 2004 PHP5 was released. It was neat and object-oriented. If somebody still wrote old-styled
HTML mixed with pieces of PHP script, it was only his choice, and the programming language no
longer was to blame. It took some time, but people gradually considered PHP as a disciplined and
professional tool. Together with the modern MVC paradigm and features styled after other frame-
works, PHP begun its amazing way to the top of web development applications.
After a few years, it became evident that Ruby on Rails had various limitations. One important
limitation was the low availability and high price of Ruby hostings while there was a lot of cheap
hosting for PHP everywhere in the world. There was also a great community that eagerly developed
early PHP frameworks. This resulted in an IT revolution that dethroned Ruby on Rails as the most
popular framework and placed a council of PHP frameworks in its place.
Figure 1-1 illustrates the change in interest in various frameworks over time expressed as search
volume in the Google search engine in the Computers & Electronics category. The fi gure was cre-
ated with Google Insights for Search, which is a more advanced form of the well known Google
Trends tool. You can check these search terms yourself to obtain results beyond mid-2010 (that’s
when this book was written), at the website
www.google.com/insights/search/.
FIGURE 11: Search volumes of frameworks in various programming languages
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