Jack Moffitt - Seven Web Frameworks in Seven Weeks: Adventures in Better Web Apps

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In 2003, I took my family to Durango, Colorado, where we rode on the Durango & Silverton train. The narrow gauges of the railroad once served well against the narrow red sandstone cliffs, where every inch of space was at a premium. These days, the train is a relic of the past, rendered obsolete by cars and planes that are safer and more efficient. Time marches on.

Today, too, we witness revolution. Single-core computers are dead or dying. True, their multicore descendants are technical marvels. They also represent a tremendous technical challenge. The languages we used to depend on do not work as well as they once did. As a result, we are seeing a new generation of languages emerge. So far, no one has been kind enough to declare a winner.

Against this backdrop in 2010, I wrote Seven Languages in Seven Weeks . In truth, I didnt expect it to sell many copies. After all, it was a book about languages in a Java world; a book about programming paradigms in a time where everything was object oriented. Still, programmers sensed the danger of our stagnating skills and embraced the concept that learning programming languages for the sake of learning them can make you smarter and better able to cope with change. The book was a resounding success.

Three years later, theres still no clear leader, though functional programming is starting to gain traction. Were finding that the multicore wafer tossed into our virtual pond years ago has created waves that are increasing in size and velocity. We need more than inheritance to organize our code. We need robust frameworks on the client to handle the robust development that is happening there. And we need true concurrent frameworks to take full advantage of their concurrent languages.

Its just not enough to lay wider tracks over the narrow tracks we used last year.

In this book, Fred and Jack will show you the leading edge of people who are reinventing the way web development should be done. Youll see a traditional object-oriented framework called Sinatra. Youll move on to the client side, where exciting things are happening with JavaScript. Youll take a tour of CanJS and AngularJS to see how to do full, rich client-side development. Next, youll swing back to the server side to see whats happening in functional languages. Youll encounter two Clojure frameworks in the minimalist Ring and the robust Immutant. Youll see a state machine--based design in Erlang called WebMachine. If those arent enough to blow your mind, youll find the incredibly powerful Haskell framework called Yesod.

The Seven in Seven books are designed to expand your mind. I am extremely proud to bring you this next installment, Seven Web Frameworks in Seven Weeks . Its my sincerest hope that this book will take you beyond whatever tracks are holding you back.

Best regards,

We would like to thank the team at the Pragmatic Bookshelf for making this book possible. Thanks especially to Jackie Carter, our editor, for all of her expertise and tireless efforts to make this book better and for bringing it to the finish line. Thanks also to Bruce Tatewe are both fans of his book, and we are honored to follow in his footsteps. Thank you, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, for creating such a great environment in which to write about the technical subjects that we all find fascinating.

Thanks to the technical reviewers who contributed their expert advice on each framework: Konstantin Haase (Sinatra), David Luecke (CanJS), Miko Hevery (AngularJS), James Reeves (Ring), Justin Sheehy (Webmachine), Michael Snoyman (Yesod), Jim Crossley and Toby Crawley (Immutant) and to the reviewers who offered their comments and suggestions for various chapters of the book: Kimberly Hagen, Kevin Wiley, Pablo Aguiar, Mick Thompson, Christopher Zorn, Nathaniel Schutta, and Aaron Bedra.