Frameworks for Layering reusable Architectures

Question

My question is very simple, my intention is to generate a repository with your responses so it could serve to the community when selecting frameworks for developing

Answer 1

To specifically answer the second question:

Developing your own framework gives you the burden of having to maintain it and educating new developers in using it.

The larger your framework becomes, the more time you have to devote specifically to it and the less time you thus have to solve your actual business problem. This is okay if your business problem is the framework, but otherwise it can become a bit of a problem, even for very large companies that can dedicate a group of people to such a framework.

If you're a smaller company (say ~15 developer max) this can really become a huge burden.

Additionally, if your own framework is the kind of framework that can take advantage of third party developments (e.g. third parties can develop components for JSF), then your own framework obviously won't be able to take advantage of that.

Unless of course you open source your own framework, but this will only significantly increase the burden of supporting it. Just dumping your source code on sourceforge does not really count. You will have to actively support it. All of a sudden your framework becomes their framework with maybe 'weird' feature requests and awkward error reports for environments that you have no personal interest in.

This also assumes that your framework will actually be used by external users. Unless it's really very, very, good and you put lots of energy in it, this will probably not happen if it's simply the umpteenth Java web- or ORM framework.

Obviously, some people have to take up the job of creating new frameworks, otherwise the industry just stagnates, but if your prime concern is your business problem I would really think twice of starting your own framework.