You're four months into a three month project, you've produced some of the best code you've ever written, but the client has yet to see a single piece of functionality that means anything to them.
You're building a User interface for your latest project. You've created lots of abstract Views, Widgets, Windows and Plugins, but nothing that looks like the system you're supposed to be building.
You used to be able to load and save data with relative ease, but lately find yourself spending more and more time trying to make your Persistence Framework work correctly.
Frameworks are wonderfully useful, they are challenging to build and insanely difficult to build well, and that's why clever coders can't get enough of them. As developers our minds naturally wander to thoughts of abstraction, and reuse. Frameworks seem like the logical destination for that train of thought.
But, there's a dark side. Messy edge cases, shoehorning of new code to fit existing frameworks, wasted hours working on the framework itself rather than actual paying projects, faulty assessment of effort, and return on investment.
We've come through something of a framework bubble. There's a growing realisation that most frameworks don't just fail to live up to promises of increased productivity, they can actually have a huge negative impact on projects.
In this session we'll look at some of the challenges to building a good framework and the techniques and patterns that help meet those challenges.
More importantly we'll try to cut through some of the myths about Frameworks and take a cold hard look at the real cost of developing and using them.