I came across a rather interesting article of an opinion of ORMs & DBMSs here which is a bit of a push away from the old mentality, and considering new options when it comes to persisting data.
If using a DBMS is like kissing your sister, designing & building "frameworks" should be like marrying her. It might be a bit too strong (as one should never marry one's sister) but 99.5% of the time development teams come up with the idea that "we should write a framework" they really, really should think again. I'm of course talking about development teams who's job is to write "application" software, *not* development teams who's primary goal is to write a framework. (Ala DNN, etc.)
Frameworks are a good thing when your goal is to apply a consistent approach to a problem domain. When you invest in a framework, the reward is to utilize it in as many ways, and as many times as to make the investment worth-while. It isn't worthwhile to create a framework that is used once, twice, five times, or even ten times. If the framework can be used in 100 different projects or more, *then* it is worth while. Time is the key factor in why application development teams should *never* waste time trying to write frameworks. How long will it be before that framework would be used in even 5 projects let alone 100?
Time is every framework's enemy. Technologies are constantly changing and it takes quite an effort to keep any piece of software up to date to take advantage of the current mainstream technology. If your development team will be expected to produce 10 applications (or distinct major releases of applications) over the next five years, can you afford or justify keeping all previous versions of the applications updated while you're also supposed to be implementing new functionality on new products? If you let projects rot on the vine with previous builds of the framework, you must realize that clients are going to expect to modify and enhance those applications for years to come.
There are a number of arguments I've heard in favor of building frameworks such as "code re-use". You do not need a framework to re-use code. Libraries and components are code re-use. "You can re-configure a framework or plug into it to introduce future functionality". Sure, but that requires investing today what you may not, and likely will not need tomorrow. And how much extra effort is going to be spent when it turns out what you guessed yesterday was wrong, and need to re-work or work around the framework to implement today's functionality?
Sometimes, it's just that development teams have stars in their eyes; a dream that they can write the ultimate system today that tomorrow and for years to come they can sit back smugly as new functional requests come in where they can just tweak a couple settings, and write a simple module. (They dream of writing themselves out of a job. :) But there's the kicker, "years". It will take years, many years before any framework constructed by an application team returns it's initial investment of tens to hundreds of thousands of lines of code, specific technologies and back-ends all perfectly aligned to meet today's vision. Ask any developer today whether they want to be working with .Net 1.1? Five years from now, are they going to be "happy" maintaining a .Net 3.5 framework? Or were they planning on upgrading their framework, and every application on it to date to .Net 4, .Net 5, and .Net 6 over the next five to ten years?
A framework is like building a closet organizer. If you build it for only what you need today, it would likely be a waste of space, and expensive/messy to tear out and replace when your needs change. So you plan for the future and build it to be flexible, to accommodate every thinkable scenario... Until you realize you didn't think of a place for your ties, so you're left stapling them to the wall.
A framework built in .Net 1.1 such as DNN justifies it's existence by enticing 1000 projects to use it. It evolves into .Net 2.0 and beyond on the merits and feedback from previous versions, hopefully to be used on a further 10,000 or more projects. When your goal today is to write a handful of applications, and you get the idea of writing that mondo-cool framework: Think of your sister.
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