About the Author

Jack Moffitt has spent a decade building things for the Web in a variety of languages and frameworks. He is a senior research engineer at Mozilla Research and works on the Servo project building an experimental new browser engine. He also helped create Ogg Vorbis and founded the Xiph.org Foundation, a non-profit which works on open, royalty free multimedia codecs. Fred Daoud is a truly passionate web developer who loves trying out new frameworks. He is the author of two other web framework books: "Stripes ...and Java Web Development Is Fun Again" and "Getting Started With Apache Click". As a software engineer for Modernizing Medicine, he develops with Stripes, jQuery, YUI, and CanJS.

Reviews

Q & A with author Jack Moffitt and Frederic Daoud Why did you decide to write this book? Jack: There are countless ways to solve problems, and programmers everywhere are discovering new techniques and building new languages in an effort to find better solutions. There are so many diverse ideas in all areas of programming, and having stumbled upon a few really eye opening ones over the years, I've wanted to share them with others. There's no one way to build a web app, and no two projects of mine have ever been built the same way. Web programming is unique in having hundreds of available frameworks and libraries; traditional GUI programming tends to have very few choices. With so many possibilities none of them perfect I wanted to expose the most interesting ideas and techniques I've found to a wider audience. Fred: Programming in general and web development in particular evolves at a fantastic pace. I felt that this book was an excellent opportunity to break out of the mainstream and explore new ideas and discover different approaches to web development. The goal with these frameworks is not to compare them which each other and pick which one to use for your next project. Rather, this book serves as a neatly organized exploration of frameworks that offer unique solutions to web development. Why did you pick these seven frameworks? Jack: Our goal was to pick frameworks that had unique and powerful ideas rather than just ones that were enjoying their moment in the spotlight. We explore minimalism, composition, static typing, state machines, declarative syntax, and more in the book. In some cases, the frameworks we chose originated the ideas we wanted to explore, and in others, the framework is just the clearest example. We also tried to pick a set of frameworks that didn't overlap much to make sure we covered as many ideas as possible. Fred: After suffering through bloated and overly complex so-called "enterprise" frameworks, it felt refreshing to explore framework