What is the difference between a framework and a l

Question

What is the difference between a framework and a library?

I always thought of a library as a set of objects and functions that is focused around solving a particular problem or around a specific area of application development (i.e. database access); a framework on the other hand is a collection of libraries centered around a particular methodology (i.e. MVC) and covers all areas of application development.

Answer 1

Library - Any set of classes or components that can be used as the client deems fit to accomplish a certain task.
Framework - mandates certain guidelines for you to "plug-in" into something bigger than you. You merely provide the pieces specific to your application/requirements in a published-required manner, so that 'the framwework can make your life easy'

Answer 2

here is linked a bitter article by Joel Spolsky, but contains a good distinction between toolboxes, libraries, frameworks and such

Answer 3

This is how I think of it (and have seen rationalized by others):

A library is something contained within your code. And a framework is a container for your application.

Answer 4

A framework can be made out of different libraries. Let's take an example.

Let's say you want to cook a fish curry. Then you need ingredients like oil, spices and other utilities. You also need fish which is your base to prepare your dish on (This is data of your application). all ingredients together called a framework. Now you gonna use them one by one or in combination to make your fish curry which is your final product. Compare that with a web framework which is made out of underscore.js, bootstrap.css, bootstrap.js, fontawesome, AngularJS etc. For an example, Twitter Bootstrap v.35.

Now, if you consider only one ingredient, like say oil. You can't use any oil you want because then it will ruin your fish (data). You can only use Olive Oil. Compare that with underscore.js. Now what brand of oil you want to use is up to you. Some dish was made with American Olive Oil (underscore.js) or Indian Olive Oil (lodash.js). This will only change taste of your application. Since they serve almost same purpose, their use depends on the developer's preference and they are easily replaceable.

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Framework : A collection of libraries which provide unique properties and behavior to your application. (All ingredients)

Library : A well defined set of instructions which provide unique properties and behavior to your data. (Oil on Fish)

Plugin : A utility build for a library (ui-router -> AngularJS) or many libraries in combination (date-picker -> bootstrap.css + jQuery) without which your plugin might now work as expected.

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P.S. AngularJS is a MVC framework but a JavaScript library. Because I believe Library extends default behavior of native technology (JavaScript in this case).

Answer 5

Libraries are for ease of use and efficiency.You can say for example that Zend library helps us accomplish different tasks with its well defined classes and functions.While a framework is something that usually forces a certain way of implementing a solution, like MVC(Model-view-controller)(reference). It is a well-defined system for the distribution of tasks like in MVC.Model contains database side,Views are for UI Interface, and controllers are for Business logic.

Answer 6

I like Cohens answer, but a more technical definition is: Your code calls a library. A framework calls your code. For example a GUI framework calls your code through event-handlers. A web framework calls your code through some request-response model.

This is also called inversion of control - suddenly the framework decides when and how to execute you code rather than the other way around as with libraries. This means that a framework also have a much larger impact on how you have to structure your code.