What is a Web Framework?

A web framework ties up the user interface, database, server, browser and middleware system and streamlines the process flow. In other words, this software framework is essential for the development of web applications, web services and dynamic as well as static websites.

Read Also: 13 Best Python Web Framework For Web Developers

A web framework consists of template frameworks, libraries with accessible data and session management.

How does a Web Framework work?

Type a website’s name into a browser say, for example www.probytes.com, and the page opens. However, in the backend of the browser, numerous processes happen in just a few seconds.

Step 1

The web server sends the HTML of the website to the web browser. (Note that the machine where this application is placed is also called web server).  Even if the application is built using CSS or JSON, they are converted to HTML and the message is sent.

Step 2

In the next step, the web browser that received the HTML message “downloads” the website from web servers also known as application servers.

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This process happens through the universal HTTP protocol, which is based on request-response model. The browser “requests” the data from the web application and the web application “responds” by sending the data.

The request – response action is only unidirectional. Only the web browser can request for data and the web application cannot do it. The different ways in which this request message is sent are HTTP GET, HTTP POST, and HTTP Response Codes. On the web application side, it responds with the HTTP 200 response.

Components of Web Framework Architecture

Web framework architecture includes the following elements – administration tool, Client Layer, Recommender Server and Generator Server. The administrator layer or tool contains Management, API Documentation, and Administration.

The Recommender Server contains API Layer, Application layer (containing online, action, offline recommender services), and Database layer that has database actions and association rules. The Generator Server has a Data mining layer, which contains both action-based and content-based generators.

Types of Framework Architectures

1. Model-View-Controller

This push-based architecture is based on the logic of separating functions and responsibilities. The tables in the database are represented as models and the business logic is contained in controllers.

The benefits of this architecture are that it allows for code reuse and also modularizes code. This architecture enables web applications to show web pages for human users and web interface for remote applications.

Action-based web frameworks are Ruby on Rails, Symfony, Spring MVC, Stripes, Django, and Diamond.

2. Component-based Framework

This kind of framework “pulls” data from controllers or view layers. This architecture allows the web application to pull multiple controllers for a single view. Frameworks that use this architecture are Wicket, Lift, Tapestry, JavaServer Faces, and JBoss Seam.

Note: Certain frameworks are both push based and pull based. A few of them are RIFE, Struts, Play and ZK.

3. Three-tier Organization

As the name says, this architecture has three physical tiers – application, database and client. The application uses business logic to run on the server and communicate with the client, which is a web browser. The web browser operates on HTML that is generated by the web application.

4. Server-side Application

When web frameworks were first developed, they were server based. This type of framework is essential as it has the necessary app logic to ensure proper user experience and interaction on the user interface.

These frameworks control and manage the database, handle HTTP requests, and also map URLs. The popular server-side frameworks are Django, Symfony, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, and Express Node.

5. Client-side Application

This framework deals with the interface that the users see and navigate. Rendering, playing sound, playing video, routing input, and more functions are handled by the front-end application framework.

This dynamic framework is also known as Single Page Application. It updates the data on the same page that the user is viewing without loading new pages.

This process enhances the performance and also reduces content reloading time. The client-side frameworks are Angular.js, JavaScript, Bootstrap, React js, Semantic UI and Backbone.

6. Mobile Application Architecture

The mobile application architecture has three layers, namely presentation, data and business. The presentation or user interface is the layer that users face. All interactions and operations happen in this layer.

The business layer takes care of the workflow and manages end user behavior. The data layer manages the data functionality, configurations, communications and settings.

The mobile operating system, storage space, device screen resolution, screen size and processor capability need to be considered while developing a mobile framework application.

Types of Frameworks

Web frameworks are classified into different types based on the programming language that is used in building them.

1. Java Web Framework

Java Framework architecture includes three components – User Machine, Enterprise Server and Database. The user machine has web browser (JavaScript/HTML/CSS).

Read Also: 10 Robust PHP Frameworks For Developing Your Web App

The Enterprise Server contains Web Container (Apache Tomcat and Java Server Pages) and EJB Container that contains Business Methods, Data Access Objects, and JBOSS/ Web Logic. The database is written in SQL and RDBMS.

Java framework with is layered architecture can be used in a range of versatile applications. This framework has numerous tool kits that can be used to simple applications to full-fledged systems.

2. Node.js Framework

Node.js Framework features four components – Client, Server, Business Layer, and Data Layer. The client includes a mobile browser, web browser, and application.

The Business Layer contains the Application Server and File System while the Data Layer includes Database and External System.

Node.js Framework works with both front end and backend applications. The architecture shares and reuses codes and exchanges codes for consistent performance. It is the best option to build cloud-based platforms.

3. Ruby on Rails Framework

The architecture contains a browser, web server, user interface, database and Rails Framework. Information travels both ways in the browser, web server and user interface.

From the user interface, the command is routed to the Controller and then travels to the View and Model. From View, the response goes back to the web server. This framework works on an open-source model and delivers good speed and configuration to complete tasks.

4. ASP.NET framework

This robust framework developed by Microsoft is built using C language. It is a lightweight framework that is used to build applications for both mobile and computer systems. This full stack framework has multiple libraries.

Read Also: Make your own web application with the Yii Framework: Tutorial

The web framework determines the performance of websites and web applications and so all the pros and cons of each framework need to be considered while building and integrating a web framework.

Our expert team of website developers has in-depth knowledge of the different kinds of web frameworks and architecture. Get in touch with us to know more about the best web framework for your application.

13 Best Python Web Framework For Web Developers

Python is a progressively favored language. It is widely used high-level programming language for general purpose programming.

It is often used by system administrators, machine learning engineers, desktop and web developers, and data scientists.  It is easily understandable and a powerful language to develop any type of system.

The large user platform of Python provides an upstanding circle. The open source community provides additional support for building programmers seeking help.

A framework is a code library which makes it easier to build scalable, maintainable and reliable web applications by providing re-usable code or extensions for regular operations.

Its low time-consuming feature allows developers to focus on application logic instead of tedious elements. There is numerous, downloadable open source Python web frameworks available online.

Best Python Frameworks:  Django, TurboGears, Tornado, web2py, Zope, Grok, CherryPy, Flask, Quixote, Nevow, BlueBream, Bottle, Pyramid are some of the top Python Web Framework Software.

Django

Django is a high level and most popular web framework for Python.  This high-level and well-organized framework simplifies the development of big and complicated web applications by giving a number of strong features.

It keeps upgrading on regular basis to match the latest trends in web application development. This feature also helps developers to achieve common web developments tasks such as user authentication, sitemap, administration, and RSS feeds.

The developers of Django can take benefit from the in-built security features given by cross-site scripting, clickjacking, Django prevents SQL injection and cross-site request forgery. On contrary, Django also helps programmers to control the website instantly to tackle a sudden spike in traffic.

TurboGears

TurboGears is designed in a way that it overcomes the deficiency of various widely used web frameworks. Python also consists of all written, data-driven web application frameworks. It allows developers and programmers to start creating web applications with the nominal setup.

TurboGears supports numerous databases and data exchange formats and horizontal data division. It also allows developers to ease web application development by taking in use different JavaScript development tools. The programmers can also use Pylons as a web server along with getting benefited by SQLAlchemy and an ORM system.

Tornado

Tornado is a Python web framework. It is was originally developed at FriendFeed. Tornado uses the non-blocking network I/O, by which it can scale thousands of open connections making it just perfect for WebSockets, long polling and other apps that need a long-lived connection to every user.

Tornado cab installed with pip or easy install. Tornado runs on any Unix-like platform but Linux and BSD are recommended for the best performance and scalability.

Web2Py

Web2Py eases down custom web application development, including practical batteries such as a web server, SQL database, and an interface based on a web. It allows programmers to build, modify, manage and change the web application’s efficiency by web browsers.

The developers can also operate Web2Py smoothly on major operating systems and web servers. They can even create web applications driven by web applications by working with various widely used relational database management systems. Simultaneously, Web2Py supports programmers to execute MVC programming and prevent common security failure.

Zope

Zope is also a Python-based, open source web application server. The programmers can further enhance Zope as per their requirement through Python code. Zope is completely different from other web frameworks. It is an object-oriented web application development platform.

Zope’s features help users to create custom web applications as per various business needs. Additionally, Zope also supports both versions of Python programming language, i.e. 2.x and 3.x. Zope 4 further gives you access to take benefit from page templates based on Chameleon and upgrade the performance of web application by minimizing memory utilization.

Grok

Zope Toolkit technology is used to develop a web framework for Python, in Grok. It allows Python users to boost their web application development by using toolkits of Zope libraries, as a set. The programmers have an option to select from a broad range of standalone and group libraries according to the need of the specific project.

The constituent planning used by Gork helps Python developers to reduce complexity in web application development by taking benefit of views, controller, and content objects.  Grok also helps by providing all the necessary resources required to create custom web applications as per the various business needs.

CherryPy

CherryPy is also designed as an object-oriented web framework for Python. It boosts web application development by giving developers an access to write short and brief code, based on object-oriented programming (OOPS) principles. 

But programmers can still simplify custom web application development by getting benefited through the in-built tools offered by CherryPy for static content, sessions, caching, and sessions.

CherryPy is now more than ten years old, and its stability and efficiency is just the same. It is used by many sites for production. CherryPy is one of the oldest we frameworks available for Python, yet it is unknown for many people. It is so because CherryPy is not equipped with in-built support. It also supports profiling, testing, and coverage.

Flask

In Flask, the web framework for python is developed based on Jinja 2 templating language. Flask boosts web application development by providing an in-built debugger and development server.

It also helps in securing integrated unit testing, Jinja 2 templating, RESTful request dispatching, and cookies. The programmers can use particular extensions to extend Flask as per the project’s specific needs.

Quixote

Quixote is a framework used for writing Web-based applications using Python. Its objectives are flexible and high performance when taken into consideration with developing a web application. It includes two major versions, version 1 and version 2 and uses two outsourced libraries,  Jinja2 template engine, and the Werkzeug WSGI toolkit.

They are quite similar but incompatible with each other. These are actively maintained and are frequently used by various public sites. It also has a demo as part of the Quixote distribution.

It offers a basic example of a Quixote application and serves as a template for new applications. Quixote is an open source framework.

Divmod Nevow

Divmod Nevow is a web application toolkit written in Python. It allows the developer to demonstrate the view logic as desired in Python, including a clear Python XML expression syntax named stan to ease this.

However, it also provides great help for designer-edited templates by using mini XML attribute language to give bi-directional template manipulation ability.

Divmod also comprises of Divmod Athena, which is a “two-way web” or “COMET” execution. This acts as a two-way bridge between the server’s Python code and JavaScript code on the client.

BlueBream

BlueBream is also an open source web application framework, server, and library for web developers. It is created by the Zope community and presently known as Zope 3.

This framework is best suitable for both medium and large projects divided into many re-usable and interchangeable components. BlueBream is based on Zoop Toolkit (ZTK). It holds years of experience ensuring that it meets the necessary requirement for consistent, stable and scalable software.

BlueBream uses the Buildout system coded in Python. It employs the ZODB (Zope Object Database) which is a transactional object database offering extremely powerful and easily –usable perseverance.

Bottle

The bottle is a simple, light and fast WSGI micro web-framework for Python. It is issued as a file and does not rely on any library other than the python standard library.

Bottle takes into use a world-wide list of search tracks (bottle.TEMPLATE_PATH) to discover templates on the file system. The Bottle’s  Routing requests function-call mapping along with the support for pure and flexible URLs.

The Bottle’s Routing Template is fast and Python-based and supports Jinja2, cheetah templates, and mako. The Bottle’s Routing Utilities gives convenient access to file uploads, form cookies, headers and other metadata related to HTTP.

Pyramid

Writing web applications is easier with Pyramid. Programmers have the freedom to begin small with “hello world” minimal response web application.

This is very useful and can take you quite far while learning. Pyramid simultaneously offers you many features as your application grows. It makes writing complicated software easy and effortless.

The pyramid is compatible with all supported versions of Python. In-Built value is provided by Full-stack frameworks that tell it what to do. On contrary, the thought of doing something unique or using something better leads to unexpected challenges in the framework.

Pyramid has a very small and slow start but it provides you with many high-quality choices. It is distinctively equipped to scale.

In future, Web developers will have the opportunity to choose from a more wide range of Python frameworks. Some of the above-mentioned frameworks are full-stack, whereas others are not.

Similarly, some of these web frameworks are getting an update which will for sure; compliment the emerging web application development shift.  Therefore, programmers will be able to develop a web application in a more accurate, efficient, and convenient way.