What criteria do you use to choose between web frameworks?

Question

Hello!Junior developer here. When picking a web framework (either on the frontend or the backend) what questions do you ask when deciding between frameworks? Are there any criteria you have found helpful, or thought would have been helpful but later turned out to not be that useful?I'm trying to figure out how best to analyse and judge frameworks that are out and about, but keep running into a riddle as to how exactly to judge them (benchmarks, features provided, popularity and questions on forums, strictness with the programmer, etc...), so I am curious how other developers have gone about thinking about this, and how their thinking has changed (without getting into some holy war).

kubanczyk · Accepted Answer

With big projects, the code will be read and written by hundreds of disoriented devs. Becoming big ball of mud is the main failure mode, by far. Getting a feel which parts of the framework will get in the way requires experience with big projects. I work with Golang, so I can say that strictness, as you call it, definitely wins big.
For small projects, you can use whatever you like and even change it for every new project. Who's to stop you? You say you don't care about benchmarks or strictness, who am I to judge?
Caveat emptor: successful small projects tend to become big projects.

warrenm · Answer

The only single (albeit two-sided) factor that has ever mattered: what do I (or the team already know), with the flip side being, what does the customer want?
I like boring technology - stuff that Just Works™, is well-known, and is going to be [relatively] easy to maintain/update
Everything else is just icing