The Rise of the Framework

First released in 2002, the Spring Framework is an application framework and inversion of control container for the Java platform. Its core features can be used by any Java application, and it became popular in the Java community as an addition to the Enterprise JavaBeans model, well before frameworks for scripting languages caught on.

Ruby on Rails followed in 2004, written in Ruby under the MIT License. It is a model-view-controller framework that provides default structures for a database, a web service and web pages, and it popularized conventions such as convention over configuration and the active record pattern that later frameworks borrowed.

By 2006 the framework idea reached the browser with jQuery, a JavaScript library built to simplify DOM tree traversal, manipulation, event handling, CSS animations and Ajax. As of August 2022 it was used by 77 percent of the 10 million most popular websites, the most widely deployed JavaScript library by a large margin.

Flask arrived in 2010 as a micro web framework written in Python. It is called a microframework because it does not require particular tools or libraries such as a database abstraction layer or form validation, relying instead on extensions that add features as if they were part of Flask itself.

Laravel followed in 2011, created by Taylor Otwell as a free and open-source PHP-based web framework built on Symfony. It follows the model-view-controller pattern and adds a modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager, along with utilities for deployment and maintenance.

Keras appeared in 2015 as an open-source library providing a Python interface for artificial neural networks. It was first independent software, then integrated into the TensorFlow library, and Keras 3 later became a low-level cross-framework language usable with JAX, TensorFlow or PyTorch from one codebase.

Angular, a TypeScript-based single-page web application framework from Google, released in 2016 as a complete rewrite of the earlier AngularJS. Its ecosystem grew to more than 1.7 million developers, library authors and content creators, and the Stack Overflow Developer Survey lists it among the most commonly used web frameworks.

The same year, Meta Platforms released PyTorch, an open-source deep learning library and successor to Torch, now developed with support from the Linux Foundation. It provides a high-level API over optimized low-level implementations of algorithms and architectures such as the Transformer, and it implements CUDA bindings that speed training by using GPU resources.