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What are the benefits of the "Convention over Configuration" paradigm in web development? And are there cases where sticking with it don't make sense?
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Convention over configuration (also known as coding by convention) is a software design paradigm used by software frameworks that attempts to decrease the number of decisions that a developer using the framework is required to make without necessarily losing flexibility and don't repeat yourself (DRY) principles.
Hence, Convention over configuration helps developers to easily communicate with the ASP.NET MVC web framework by providing the pre-defined conventions, as shown in Figure-3 below.
Spring has always favoured convention over configuration, which means it takes up the majority of working uses cases into consideration and goes by it rather than nit-picking an exact configuration and dependencies required for a specific application development.
"Convention Over Configuration" means as long as you follow certain conventions you do not need to add additional configuration. For example, when you have a User model in your application then Rails assumes that it is defined in the file at app/models/user.
Convention states that 90% of the time it will be a certain way. When you deviate from that convention then you can make changes...versus forcing each and every user to understand each and every configuration parameter. The idea is that if you need it to differ you will search it out at that point in time versus trying to wrap your head around all the configuration parameters when it often times has no real value.
IMHO it always makes sense. Making convention the priority over explicit configuration is ideal. Again if someone has a concern, they will force themselves to investigate the need.
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I think the benefit is simple: No configuration necessary. You don't need to define locations for this-or-that type of resource, for example, for the app/framework to find them itself.
As for cases where it does not make sense: any situation where it will be fairly frequent that alternative configurations would be required, or where it makes sense that a developer/admin would need to 'opt-in' to some behavior explicitly (for example, to prevent unintended and unexpected side-effects that could have security implications).
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The benefit of convention over configuration paradigm in web development the productivity since you won't be required to configured to set all the rules and there are less decision that a programmer has to make. This is evident when using the .NET Framework.
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The most obvious benefit is that you will have to write lesser code. Let's take case of Java Persistence API. When you define a POJO having attributes and corresponding setters/getters, it's a simple class. But the moment you annotate it with @javax.persistence.Entity it becomes an entity object (table) which can get persisted in DB. Now this was achieved by just a simple annotation, no other config file.
Another plus point is, all your logic is at one place and in one language (i.e. you get rid of separate xml).
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