 Why do web frameworks always use database?
ismarc: Disk I/O is a huge limiting factor in a filesystem based approach to data persistence.  Using a database for the persistence of data allows the db to schedule flushing the state to disk, independent of the actual requests.  The situation you're specifically talking about, where there's nothing but static pages, there's no point in using a framework that's designed around building dynamic pages.  You could just as easily write/use a templating system that takes content files and generates the HTML files from that content, and just run it when you have new content.