Top 10 backend frameworks in 2021. The software development industry progresses through continuous evolution where people try to solve problems which are worth solving economically. The introduction of frameworks into web development is one more step towards rapid and easier development. But what is a programming framework exactly? It is a platform which provides larger coding blocks to developers for building applications rapidly, the larger coding blocks can be easily integrated by using predefined rules for the framework. In technical terms building an application with core programming language is an extremely tedious process that’s why developers needed a platform that could provide a higher level of abstraction. In these frameworks frequently used coding blocks are written as functions with best coding practices and the developers can simply call these functions rather than writing the complete code themselves. For example to build login functionality in spring java developers can use following functions:
-
loginPage() – the custom login page
-
loginProcessingUrl() – the URL to submit the username and password to
-
defaultSuccessUrl() – the landing page after a successful login
-
failureUrl() – the landing page after an unsuccessful login
-
logoutUrl() – the custom logout
Top 10 best emerging backend frameworks to choose in 2021
What a framework is, let's dive into the list of top 10 emerging backend frameworks for 2021 which were developed over trending backed programming languages.
-
Spring
-
Play
-
Node js
-
Laravel
-
Symphony
-
CakePHP
-
Ruby on Rails
-
Django
-
Flask
-
Asp.Net
1. Spring
Spring is the most popular framework of java and it has been in existence since 2003. Due to such a long lifecycle and best in class features spring framework has cascaded into almost every use case and tech company. The inversion of control, dependency injection, pojo based programming model has made spring flexible and easy to work with framework. Spring provides a complete ecosystem that’s rapidly evolving and the spring projects such as spring boot extend the availability of fundamental building blocks required to build applications at a much faster pace.
-
Core provides features like DI (Dependency Injection), Internationalisation, Validation, and Aspect Oriented Programming.
-
Data Access supports data access through JTA (Java Transaction API), JPA (Java Persistence API), and JDBC (Java Database Connectivity)
-
Web Supports both Servlet API (Spring MVC) and Reactive API (Spring WebFlux), and additionally supports WebSockets, STOMP, and WebClient
-
Integration supports integration to enterprise Java through JMS (Java Message Service), JMX (Java Management Extension), and RMI (Remote Method Invocation)
-
Testing provides wide support for unit and integration testing through Mock Objects, Test Fixtures, Context Management, and Caching
-
The engineers at spring are working continuously to improve the performance of these fundamental blocks and reduce the proportional dependability in every aspect.
2. Play
Play Framework is an open-source web application development framework which follows the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern. It is written in Scala and usable from other programming languages that are compiled to JVM Bytecode such as Java. It aims to optimize developer productivity by using convention over configuration, hot code reloading and display of errors in the browser.
-
Stateless: Play 2 is fully RESTful – there is no Java EE session per connection.
-
Integrated unit testing: JUnit and Selenium support is included in the core.
-
API comes with most required elements built-in.
Asynchronous I/O: due to using Akka HTTP as its web server, Play can service long requests asynchronously rather than tying up HTTP threads doing business logic like Java EE frameworks that don't use the asynchronous support offered by Servlet 3.0.
3. Node js
Node.js is a runtime environment based on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, though it is used in this article but do not get confused about considering it as a framework or a library. For those who don’t know about V8 JavaScript engine, it is one of Google's open source projects which compiles JavaScript directly to native machine code using just-in-time compilation before executing it. The asynchronous implementation of node js makes it capable of handling asynchronous requests in a non blocking manner that too in a single threaded way. When node js is used in front end and js based frameworks on frontend then the communication between both ends can work in JSON, no need to convert it into binary or base 64 as it’s done with other popular backend programming languages. So a step of converting data format is eliminated which increases the speed of application that’s why node js is often considered as fastest among its peers. Although single threaded asynchronous implementation appears to be a boon in apps where data needs to be updated constantly but it becomes a bane with heavy computational tasks as it causes callback hell.
4. Laravel
Laravel is one of the best PHP frameworks that’s being used these days widely. Laravel uses MVC architecture, 2 way data binding, Eloquent as laravel’s ORM, Artisan CLI, Blade templating engine, PHPunit for test cases, convention over configuration approach, highly sophisticated yet easy to integrate user authentication module and a lot more that’s extremely suitable to get easily integrated with popular frontend frameworks such as vue js, react js and angular.
5. Symphony
Symphony is a PHP based framework that was launched in 2005. Symphony has a good collection of generic components that developers can use to develop an application at a much faster speed because their time gets saved as they don’t have to create many components. Symphony is a well matured framework that is supported by a big community of developers. The availability of a large number of open source projects available in PHP is also a reason to use symphony for rapid app development.
6. CakePHP
CakePHP is a PHP based backend framework that uses hierarchical model view controller architecture. In many aspects CakePHP is similar to laravel however CakePHP doesn’t use 2 way data binding that’s why it is not considered reliable for developing large applications. CakePHP is simple enough and good to be used for developing small applications.
7. Ruby on Rails
Ruby on rails is an open source backend framework which has been in existence since 2004. The ideology to develop this framework has been convention over configuration which evolved it as an easy to use framework for building web applications. However this ideology is also the reason that this technology lags in performance as compared to its peers such as node js. The community of ruby on rails developers is large and supportive.
8. Django
Django is a python based backend framework that was built for rapid application development. Django also has a powerful admin dashboard that allows developers to easily manipulate data. The syntax of this framework is also very clean on which python developers can easily work even if they just started using this framework. Django is versatile, secure, scalable, portable and easily maintainable.
9. Flask
Flask is a python based backend framework that was introduced in 2010 so it is not that old as Django. Flask offers more customization as compared to Django and offers less level of abstraction. Flask supports a large number of databases and the code base for flask is also light weight. Choosing flask over Django is usually done when developers need granular control over components but it increases the cost of web app development.
10. Asp.Net
Asp.net is an open source framework based on .Net platform that is developed by microsoft. .Net is a developer platform made up of tools, libraries and programming languages used for web application development. ASP.net follows MVC architecture and it is a cross platform framework that runs on linux, macOS, windows and docker. A lot of functionalities from windows can be seen in this platform which helps to reduce the size of code drastically and support rapid web app development.
The decision to choose the right backend framework for developing mobile and web applications lies between performance, scalability and the availability of open source code. Every backend framework has its own speciality so it’s up to solutions architects to decide which framework suits best to their application’s use case.