Re^3: Tiny Frameworks

[BrowserUk]

Hmm. From my perspective this is all about terminology. Let's try an analogy:

When they built The Swiss Re Tower, some company was charged with the manufacture of the 5500 triangular and diamond-shaped glass panels that form the outer cladding. As these panels vary in size for each of the 40 floors, there was no doubt some mechanism for inputing the required sizes for each of the aluminium extrusions that make up the panels to the (probably digitally controlled) cutting machines.

In terms of the manufacture of the panels, that mechanism may have been seen as some kind of a "framework". But in terms of the construction of the building, the term "framework" was probably reserved for the steel 'diagrid' that forms the overall shape and load-bearing structure for the building.

There are already many terms for tools that are used to construct classes: Library; toolkit; Meta class; Specification language; Class Factory; etc. All of which make more or less sense depending upon the philosophy behind them; the interface they present; the way they operate; and the way they are intended to be used. Do a CPAN search: Class::* and read the first few lines of each module (say the first couple of hundred) for examples of all these and more.

There seems little purpose in taking a term 'framework', that already has a fairly intuative interpretation, and qualifying it with 'tiny', in order to bend it to fit a conceptual space that is already heavily overloaded with terminology.

[goibhniu]

Thanks. That was more helpful to me than the "frameworks call you; you call libraries" distinction.

Cool building, BTW.