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web development framework (WDF)

By Robert Sheldon

What is a web development framework (WDF)?

A web development framework is a set of resources and tools for software developers to build and manage web applications, web services and websites, as well as to develop application programming interfaces (APIs). Web development frameworks are also referred to as web application frameworks or simply web frameworks.

Web development frameworks enable developers to build applications that can run on well-known technology stacks such as the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) stack. Most frameworks provide a wide range of features and functionality that help streamline application development. For example, they might include any of the following components:

Because web development frameworks are so comprehensive in scope, they offer development teams several important benefits, including the following:

A web development framework also provides the foundation and system-level services necessary to support a content management system (CMS). A content management system is an application built on top of the development framework that adds functionality for dynamically managing digital web content.

What are the web framework types?

Organizations can choose from a wide range of web development frameworks -- each offering an assortment of features -- giving development teams plenty of options from which to choose. Despite their differences, however, most frameworks fall into one of two categories: those that target front-end development and those that target the back end:

Web development frameworks are also distinguished from each other by their approach to application architecture. Many web development frameworks are based on a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, which separates the web application into three layers. The Model layer is concerned with the back-end business logic and data. The View layer focuses on the user interface and facilitating interactivity. The Controller layer acts as an interface between the model and view layers, processing the requests between them.

A variation of the MVC architecture is the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) architecture. Instead of a Controller layer, the MVVM model includes the ViewModel layer, which contains the controls necessary to interact with the View layer. The framework uses binding to connect the UI elements in the View layer to the controls in the ViewModel layer.

Some web development frameworks use a push-based architecture in which the server pushes data to the View layer, while others use a pull-based architecture in which the View layer pulls the data from the server.

Another approach used by some web development frameworks is the traditional Three-Tier architecture, which divides the application into a presentation tier, application tier and data tier. The presentation tier focuses on the user interface, the application tier provides the business logic that supports the application's core functionality, and the data tier manages the data sources and the communications to and from those data sources.

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26 Jun 2023

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