What if, instead of needing a framework, we just wrote tiny modules of functionality and composed them into an application?
This is how the nodejs guys are doing this via npm and I must say, it's staggering. The core node "framework" has a tiny API, and the heart of it is simply require().
This, entirely. You can effectively construct your own framework by combining other pre-established routers, models, and views (plus whatever other modules you might want). You still get many of the benefits of using frameworks (testing, docs), but it's much more flexible and has the potential to be leaner. You still need to establish best practices and a relatively consistent application design, but these are things you'd want to do anyway... even if using Backbone, or whatevs.
Yes exactly! Modules like in Node.js or libraries as in PHP are a lot more flexible and IMHO better than frameworks.
I coded single page HTML5 apps in JS and Node.js/PHP and avoided any frameworks. A few helper functions are enough and I got a codebase that is easy to read, refactore and the overall code size is small and the execution is fast.
This is how the nodejs guys are doing this via npm and I must say, it's staggering. The core node "framework" has a tiny API, and the heart of it is simply require().