I’ve used things like Tailwind CSS and Next.js and I know that Tailwind CSS has predefined CSS classes and Next.js allows you to use HTML while allowing JavaScript integration, but what really is a framework? Is there a definition or something that would be able to classify React as a library but Next.js as a framework?
In: Technology
In general there isn’t really a strict definition of a framework vs a library, as far as I’m aware. The difference in general is that libraries are collections of classes, methods, structs, etc that you can leverage to not write everything from scratch. Frameworks, like React in JS or Leptos in Rust, are themselves collections of libraries and prebuilt data structures to streamline development on specific platforms and for specific purposes—React is a general front end framework, so it comes with a bunch of libraries and components for building out the UI and interactivity/reactivity of your website. Next.js is a framework built specifically for rendering on the server, as opposed to client side rendering. .NET is a framework for building desktop applications. All of these cobble together a ton of different libraries and different prebuilt components to make developing software easier, while a single library is a piece of that.
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