My top 3 web development frameworks in 2021
Let’s be clear: this is my personal list, they are not the top 3 ones in the world, for everybody. Why? Because there are as many frameworks as developers (kind of), so there are tons of top 3 possibilities.
This was a difficult choice. There are tons of awesome, beautiful and amazingly well written frameworks out there. I’ve work with a bunch of them in the past and, to be honest, I had to move out of the list some of the ones I love. This list was created with my experience, so I hope you find it useful. Let’s go!
Symfony (PHP)
Ok, I know: PHP… Let me give you some freshly news: current PHP is just awesome. In this link you can see a comparison of different frameworks and in the top 7 you can see 6 Golang frameworks and… 1 PHP framework!
Things went so fast from PHP 5.6 and Symfony couldn’t do better. The framework evolved so good that it’s a real pleasure learning how to develop with Symfony.
They took a lot of things from the best languages and frameworks, and now you have a fully decoupled framework to start developing your API or the whole website.
Symfony has everything you need to start developing your project business logic without having to worry about security, assets, or even Webpack (which is a pain in the ass sometimes).
This is my favorite framework so far, and even though I’ve tried to be open-minded and work with a bunch of different frameworks, I was not able to change my mind with it.
Ruby on Rails (Ruby)
It’s been more than 15 years since the first version of Ruby on Rails and, nowadays, I can totally say that it’s one of the best web-application or MVC frameworks out there.
It reminds me a lot of Symfony: excellent documentation, everything you need to start developing your business and do not reinvent the wheel, easy to extend with new features… I can’t find a reason why you don’t want to use Ruby on Rails on your next project, despite the fact that you don’t like Ruby, of course!
You can find HUGE websites developed with this framework, such as Gitlab.com. The community is awesome and they are always active. If you give it a try, you won’t regret about it, believe me.
Blitz.js (Node)
What the heck is Blitz.js? Some of you may not know anything about this, but you may have heard about NextJS, haven’t you?
This one is a last addition to my personal list. I was working with NextJS when I found that I always needed some backend features out of that framework. Don’t misunderstand me: NextJS is fu**** awesome, but it’s a frontend framework with some “lambda” features.
So I started developing my own boilerplate based on NextJS (I do have my personal standards or boilerplates for other frameworks, such as Symfony): added Prisma for database, added Prettier, added… tons of libraries that I had to maintain version after version.
And then… something happened. I found Blitz.js: everything I wanted already packaged, configured and ready to start your fullstack web development.
It’s still in beta, but I’ve created a couple of websites with it, and it works like a charm. NodeJS is getting more and more fans every single night, so this framework deserves the podium, even though I had to drop out some other frameworks. So sorry.
Other amazing frameworks
If I have to continue the list, I would choose the following frameworks. Definitely broke my heart not having any of those in the main list:
- Spring (Java)
- Django (Python)
- Laravel (PHP)
In this Github you can find a huge list of different platforms and frameworks to continue your own research.
And there’s always a place to highlight the Web Developer Roadmap, where you can see all the different paths in 2021 and kill yourself to choose to be a web developer… or not.
Happy dev!
