this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
-1 points (47.8% liked)
Web Development
5697 readers
39 users here now
Welcome to the web development community! This is a place to post, discuss, get help about, etc. anything related to web development
What is web development?
Web development is the process of creating websites or web applications
Rules/Guidelines
- Follow the programming.dev site rules
- Keep content related to web development
- If what you're posting relates to one of the related communities, crosspost it into there to help them grow
- If youre posting an article older than two years put the year it was made in brackets after the title
Related Communities
- !html@programming.dev
- !css@programming.dev
- !uiux@programming.dev
- !a11y@programming.dev
- !react@programming.dev
- !vuejs@programming.dev
- !webassembly@programming.dev
- !javascript@programming.dev
- !typescript@programming.dev
- !nodejs@programming.dev
- !astro@programming.dev
- !angular@programming.dev
- !tauri@programming.dev
- !sveltejs@programming.dev
- !pwa@programming.dev
Wormhole
Some webdev blogs
Not sure what to post in here? Want some web development related things to read?
Heres a couple blogs that have web development related content
- https://frontendfoc.us/ - [RSS]
- https://wesbos.com/blog
- https://davidwalsh.name/ - [RSS]
- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/
- https://sia.codes/posts/ - [RSS]
- https://www.smashingmagazine.com/ - [RSS]
- https://www.bennadel.com/ - [RSS]
- https://web.dev/ - [RSS]
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think you're using the word "framework" quite broadly here. Cloudflare and databases aren't "frameworks". The word is perhaps ill-defined, but generally it means something like "an opinionated library ecosystem in a programming language". React, Vue, and the like are Javascript "framework" libraries for making what are called Single Page Applications. They are hardly the only way to make websites, though, and some (including yours truly) believe them to much more trouble than they are worth for most purposes.
Laravel, Django, Ruby on Rails, etc. are all backend/server-side "framework" libraries for creating Multi-Page Applications, or in other words, the model for which the web was originally designed (that is, you get HTML and follow links embedded in that HTML to get to new pages).
At any rate, a "file system for a website" is quite vague. It really depends on what your goals are. You have to define what is you're trying to do and who it's for. It's not particularly difficult to spin up an sftp server to allow remote access to files if all you care about is remote copying, but I'm going to assume you mean a file server served over HTTP(S).
There's about a million tools out there for serving up static files, getting a directory listing, etc., and it really depends on your goals. It's fairly simple to configure nginx to serve up a directory with a very rudimentary index if you don't need anything fancy (nginx can do fancy too, ofc, just takes more work than what comes out of the box). I personally like Caddy over nginx these days, though. Caddy in particular requires very little configuration, honestly.
But yeah, without more information about what is is you're trying to accomplish, it's difficult to give specific recommendations.
Nah, disagreement on semantics. I used Framework to broadly describe codebases which do a ton of work that a developer can rely on without building their own from scratch, which is accurate. Every mechanism or benefit that Cloudflare CDNJS provides for the user could technically be done by the developers themselves, as unlikely as that is.
I mean, that's simply an incorrect definition and not what anyone means when they use the word, speaking as a senior engineer working on web applications over the last 10 years. Such a broad definition is practically meaningless since it encompasses pretty much everything in programming.
A database is 100% not a "framework", it is a software application that allows clients to retrieve data by supplying queries in a dedicated DSL.
cdnjsis also decidedly not a framework, nor is any other CDN. CDNs are an infrastructural component in networking that allows content to be cached in servers that are geographically distributed over large distances in order to reduce the effects of network transmission time (since content can be served from servers closer to the client). It has very little to do with programming.A framework is a library (or possibly, set of related libraries) in a programming language that aims to be very "batteries-included", insofar as the programmer gives up precise control over the program they are creating in exchange for having many commonly-needed things for the task (typically, SPAs or web servers) already done for them. The reason I said it's perhaps ill-defined as a word is that the line between what counts as a library and what counts as a framework is a bit blurry.
You tell me my definition is wrong and then confidently churn out the same definition.
You can code the mechanisms for a CDN. You might not have the servers to run it on, but you can. It is a framework
It is not at all the same definition. A CDN is not a programming language library, which is how I had defined frameworks (with other qualifiers). All frameworks are (one or more) libraries in a programming language. A CDN is, ultimately, a network of running servers that serve up content. It's a distribution mechanism for content, not a method of building software applications (which is what frameworks are). You can use a CDN to deliver the code for a framework/library to a web browser (or anywhere else, really), but that is not the same as saying that it is a framework itself, because it is not.
A bunch of people in this thread, including myself, have been trying to help answer your original question (part of which is clarifying terms, since you seem to be confused about how things work, which is understandable for someone inexperienced), and yet you've been very combative and lashing out at people in spite of describing yourself as an amateur. When experts in the field correct your misunderstandings, it's wise to learn from the information you're given rather than telling everyone that they are wrong. Your attitude will not get you very far and will simply make people unwilling to help you learn.
You think they were just magicked into existence? Nah, they were programmed, and you can use specific syntax to call upon their functions.
What, praytell, is this supposed syntax? A curl invocation? Including a link to a CDN resource in an HTML
<script>tag?A URL on the web is not what anyone would call a framework, I'm sorry to say. Is
www.google.coma framework? Google programmed the server serving the content at that URL, right? Or what, is it only special URLs that only programmers use? Is your operating system a "framework"? Someone programmed that too, right? How about your coffee maker? That's also something someone programmed.It's funny how the wikipedia article on CDNs doesn't mention the word "framework" once, yet the article on a real framework like React mentions the word 8 times and links to other frameworks and lists of frameworks.
Maybe, just maybe, it has a more narrow definition than "someone programmed it so you don't have to".
That's just straight up wrong man. A lot of words in programming are not just semantics, they're concrete shorthands for very specific things.