what is the difference between a framework and a library this is probably one of the least understood questions I find many people struggling with answers to this question are often vague confusing or convoluted for example I've heard some people describe the difference between a framework and a library as a framework just being a collection of libraries however this is not entirely true because not all Frameworks use or even depend on libraries in some cases this is where some people get really long-winded and exceedingly vague in trying to describe the differences however I believe there is
a much simpler way to answer this question concisely and correctly the simple answer is that the distinguishing difference between a framework and a library is who calls whom in other words in a framework the framework code calls on your code and in a library it is your code that makes calls to the library try to think of this in the same way that you think about the relationship between a server and a client in a typical server client relationship the client makes requests to the server and the server responds to the client for example curl
is a library in PHP when you use one of the curl functions it is your PHP code that is calling a function in the curl Library this makes your code the caller and the library code the call E when you use a PHP framework like larvel for example this relationship gets inverted and it is the framework code that makes calls to your application code that you have written in the framework this employs a design commonly known as inversion of control so the call or call E relationship becomes inverted when the caller depends on the call
E to define the functionality or behavior of the program and the call E depends on the caller to define the flow of control in the program this can also be easily observed in something like jQuery which is a JavaScript framework when you do something like document on ready it is the framework that will be making the call to this call back that you have defined when the document is in a ready State this is the flow of control portion of the framework which it is now responsible for similarly how in a typical PHP MVC framework
you would see that it is the framework that defines the front controller which takes on all of the incoming requests and hands down the information to your underlying application code through some userdefined controller this then collects the response thusly maintaining the control flow over the application but relinquishing the definition of behavior to the application code so the real difference between Frameworks and libraries is about control specifically the flow of control Frameworks ultimately control the flow of your application and libraries do not
