There is without a doubt an almost frightening amount of options for developers to choose from, when selecting a framework for development of web applications.
With the immense popularity of client-side or JavaScript-based solutions, it's easy to forget about the merits of good old server-side solutions. They deserve to be remembered, recorded and preserved and in order to provide their legacy to the after-web.
In an answer to this question, and as an answer to a calling - we're doing just that! We have cloned the popular TodoMVC project, to re-build it in an old and familiar way.
This time, server-side only!
Choosing a framework or a set of tools is probably more about the subjective feeling that we get (at least more than we care to admit) than it is about making an objective decision.
What we would like to do here is to provide a large set of code examples, that show how each framework goes about doing the same thing.
We're hoping that this can provide a base of reference when discussing more subjective feelings and views on which tool is the best for the task at hand. A suggestion is to couple this with other, more objective evaluations. For example the very interesting Web Frameworks Benchmark.
The doors are open. Anyone deeply in love with a server-side framework may join-in, clone-out and pull-request-away with ideas and contributions for the list of example implementations.
We're also very grateful for suggestions, comments and constructive criticism on how to make each solution present the framework it uses in the best possible idiomatic way.
See the template-example subdirectory for instructions on how to create your own Server-Side TodoMVC implementation.
Even though this probably is more of a project for old farts, and of course made with a bit of tongue-in-cheek. I think it's interesting to provide example implementations that still push the envelope of using the most modern language features possible - for example using helper libraries for collections, maps, JSON serialization or simplified file-I/O. Go nuts!
Currently make is your friend - there's even a default target that guides you
into setting up your development environment, building, testing and running the
examples. Just try it out:
make <help>
This project is a derivative work of the great TodoMVC project, so we stay with the MIT License (please see the LICENSE file for more detailed information).
We also whish to aknowledge the authors and contributors of the original project.