Are microframeworks intended for large code bases?

Question

I ask about the longevity of microframeworks like Flask, Bottle, and expressjs. Advantages: small, fast, manageable.

Are they intended to be replaced as code complexity and user base grow? Also asked: should they be replaced with a full framework like Django or Pyramid, or are microframeworks the new standard?

Answer 1

Well, it kind of depends on what you mean by growth. Let's look at two possibilities:

1. User growth. If you're building an application with fairly fixed features which you expect to have a rapidly expanding user-base (like Twitter), then a microframework may be ideally suited for scalability since it's already stripped down to the bare essentials + your application code.

2. Feature growth. If you have a site which you're expecting to require rapid addition of many discrete and complex yet generic features (forums, messaging, commerce, mini-applications, plugins, complex APIs, blogs), then you may save time by using a full-featured framework like Django or Ruby on Rails.

Basically, the only reason a microframework might be unsuitable for your application in the long term is if you think you would benefit from plug-and-play functionality. Because fully-featured frameworks are higher-level than microframeworks, you'll often find fully-featured solutions as plugins right out of the box. Blogs, authentication, and so on. With microframeworks you're expected to roll your own solutions for these things, but with access to a lot of lower-level functionality through the community.

Answer 2

It depends on what the (micro)framework supports, as well as the amount of documentation provided for it.

For example, a site using Flask needs a database for storing data. Even though Flask does not have a database extension built in, there are extensions available for it.