Framework · 2007–now · Web Boom
Sinatra
Minimal Ruby routing for apps that did not need all of Rails. DSL elegance in a few hundred lines.
Sinatra faded as Rails absorbed API modes and Node ate small-service mindshare. It was perfect for webhooks and internal tools — niches that grew frameworks around them. The idea stuck; the brand did not need to.
Context
The browser ate the desktop
The web became the default delivery surface. LAMP and Rails made shipping cheap; Ajax made pages feel like apps; SOAP/SOA tried to enterprise-ify the wire. REST won by being debuggable with curl. This decade invented the modern product cadence — and the habit of treating every new framework as destiny.
Compare with
Related
Framework · 2004–now
Ruby on Rails
Convention over configuration. Taught a decade of frameworks how to ship MVPs — and how to hit scaling walls.
Framework · 2010–now
Express.js
Thin routing layer on Node that became the default API sketchpad. Middleware culture in a single file.
Framework · 2010–now
Flask
Small Python core, extensions for everything else. The pragmatic counterweight to Django's batteries.