I'm currently building a multi-tenant, single code-base MVC app hosted on Windows Azure and have come up with my own application framework work to support it.
Although it works I'm still not a 100% happy with it and I was wondering if anyone knew of a good example of multi-database,single code base out there ?
I'm not sure about the multitenancy, but KiGG is really nice example of domain driven design and application supporting multiple databases. It doesn't use multiple databases at the same time, but they way the layers are designed allows very nice extensibility, for example for caching or logging.
I think the design approach of KiGG is very good for multitenancy too, and even if it doesn't answer your question completely, I think it is worth of reading the code anyway.
Related
What aspects of MVC performance affect your web application performance the most? Database access is usually pointed out as the default culprit but are there other components that have an impact? Do you prioritize the number of concurrent clients, the memory used on the server, the response time, or something else?
This answer contains some very good general suggestions but I'm looking for specifics of where the framework falls short of your expectations.
The ASP.NET MVC framework is great and sites like this one which is using it are obvious examples. There is nothing in it that affects my applications performance. It just works very nice. What affects performance is poor code or poor architecture conception but that's definitely not something we can blame the framework for. After spending years with ASP.NET webforms I cannot say that the performance of MVC is worst or better, what I can say is that it converted the painful experience of writing web applications into something that brings so much joy. I've been successfully running applications in production since ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and never had any problems.
In your question you mention database access => that's a problem that all web applications have and which is not inherent to the framework being used. Also in heavy traffic sites the usage of caching could improve performance and ASP.NET MVC have some really good caching mechanisms built-in.
So, all I can say is that you and the team delivering this great framework are doing a very good job.
Now that I realize who is asking this question I understand the question better.
The biggest problem I've had with MVC is that RenderPartial can be very slow when you're using embedded resources as views. If I remember this was caused by the VirtualPathProvider not performing that well. We ended up trying to use memoization to speed some calls up but eventually had to start writing directly to the view output stream.
I think we ran into the same issue as the lostechies guys did with a similar take on their input builders only we used it to generate grids.
http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/hex/archive/2009/06/14/opinionated-input-builders-part-7-more-on-performance-take-2.aspx
I have little experience with ruby itself. I am going to hire somebody to write a web based application and I wanted it to be written in RoR but I was recommend mono. I guess because they like mono and because they think the RoR is slow.
The whole application would be some kind of social media meta management tool. There will be front end web based part and then back end doing the 'real stuff'.
I have no experience with mono at all and I am not experienced enough to comfortably say that RoR is the best choice.
I understood that if RoR is configured properly it could be pretty fast. I read that RoR has some troubles with scalability. I will start the application small and if it's successful I need to scale it up.
What would you recommend?
in the light of
performance
scalability
easiness to test
easiness to maintain, develop code/project
( I like ruby but I am not going to be the developer myself. I prefer to choose the 'better' option if there is such answer to that question)
please feel free to suggest anything else ...
If you are not going to write it yourself, you may want to go with what the person who will write it is most comfortable with.
Full disclosure: I have developed several sites now using Mono and I love it. I have used Ruby-on-Rails but not for anything nearly as big as what I have done in Mono. Keep that in mind.
Quick answer: In the greater scheme of things, Ruby-on-Rails and ASP.NET MVC have more in common than not. My choice would be ASP.NET MVC on Mono but I doubt you would regret choosing either.
Architecture: If you want one way of doing it out of the box, choose Ruby-on-Rails. If you want to be able to choose what you feel are the best-of-the-best technologies from a range of choices, choose .NET (Mono).
Ruby-on-Rails is more of a turn-key solution in that it provides a standard way of doing pretty much everything you need out of the box. .NET (Mono) offers a lot more power (my opinion let's say) but there are a lot of different pieces to choose from and you have to choose a technology stack yourself. As an example, RoR has a standard way of accessing databases while .NET Mono let/force you to choose from a dozen different ways to do that.
Mono and .NET generally have a little better separation of concerns so the purist in you might like that. If not, you actually find the roll-up-your sleeves and get it done attitude of Ruby more to your liking.
Performance and Scalability: This should clearly go to .NET and Mono. In fact, I believe the fastest way to run Ruby-on-Rails is to use IronRuby to run it on .NET. StackOverflow is written in ASP.NET MVC and, given the amount of traffic, it obviously performs great. Proof is in the pudding. That said, the performance bottleneck will probably not be your choice of framework.
Testing: Old style ASP.NET (now called WebForms) is considered pretty hard to test. The newer ASP.NET MVC was designed to be easy to test and is similar to RoR. One major factor is that in Mono you will probably be using a statically typed language (like C#) while Ruby is of course a dynamically typed language. You have to write more tests in a dynamic language (because the compiler/interpreter will not catch type problems) but it can also be easier to write tests if you are not fighting the compiler. I think it is a matter of taste and style (I like static) but this is a major factor in answering this question.
Of course, since .NET/Mono is a multi-language platform, you could always write your ASP.NET MVC tests in a dynamic language. You could even do it in Ruby (IronRuby). Perhaps that would be the best of both worlds (static checking on your real code and flexible dynamism in your tests). I have considered doing this myself using IronPython for tests.
Maintenance and development: This is a tough one. It depends what you are writing, what third-party libraries you might need, and what tools you are going to use. I would say that RoR is probably the more advanced MVC framework. My own thoughts are that Ruby-on-Rails is probably a shade easier to write but a little bit harder to maintain.
Community: I like the Ruby community more than the .NET one but I think I like the Mono one the best. That makes it a little confusing. The core Mono guys (like Michael Hutchinson that answered here) are simply awesome. I really like MonoDevelop as a tool (IDE) as well. It just keeps getting better and better. Michael, thank you for Git support if you had anything to do with that. :-)
Tools: If you are writing for Mono you can use the whole universe of .NET tools (VisualStudio, ReSharper, Reflector, etc) so that is pretty hard to beat. That is assuming you develop on Windows of course. On Linux or Mac the tool of choice for Mono would be MonoDevelop. It supports version control, a software debugger, and NUnit tests right in the IDE and is completely cross-platform.
It seems like a lot of Ruby folks just use a simple text editor. This may just be because an IDE just does not have as much to offer a dynamic language as it does a static one. Here is a SO question on what people like for Ruby:
What Ruby IDE do you prefer?
EDIT: Just to make things confusing...there is another MVC framework for .NET/Mono that is even more like Ruby-on-Rails; MonoRail even has an implementation of ActiveRecord. MonoRail has actually been around longer than ASP.NET MVC but I would stick with ASP.NET MVC these days as that is where the future lies. ASP.NET MVC is open source by the way and ships with Mono out of the box (the actual Microsoft code).
I can speak more to Rails than Mono. RoR is pretty scalable these days with all of the cloud hosting services available. Web applications query data and render web pages using that data, which really isn't that big of a deal. Most performance issues are caused by database and schema design issues, not the web framework. Typically, database response times dwarf other portions of server processing. RoR is also very easy to test. Testing is a more natural part of development than in other languages that I use. When I started RoR programming I was used to the much more structured world of Java, and the more dynamic Rails won me over for web development.
Firstly, I work on MonoDevelop, a crossplatform IDE for Mono (including ASP.NET & ASP.NET MVC), so feel free to consider my answer biased, but hopefully it will be helpful anyway.
Performance: a decent JIT compiler (Mono) should be much faster than an interpreter (Ruby). But it depends on the programmer's skill too - well-written Ruby could be faster than really badly written C#. The libraries and database and caching mechanisms you use will be a big factor too, but these aren't fundamental to the languages/frameworks.
Scalability: AFAIK there is no magic bullet for web app scalability, and although I don't have practical experience in this field, here's some info I've picked up. It really depends on your database usage, how your session state is stored, and how caching is implemented. This isn't really fundamental to either framework - once you start scaling to multiple machines, you'll probably have many machines/processes for database servers, cache servers, message queues, frontends, servers for static content, etc. Likely only the frontends will be ASP.NET or ROR, and if they're stateless, you can simply clone them and handle the scalability problems on the backend.
Testing: I can't speak for Ruby, but ASP.NET MVC (but not vanilla ASP.NET) was designed to be easily testable using .NET testing tools such as NUnit (Mono's own unit tests use NUnit).
Maintenance and development: Again, I can't really speak for Ruby, but it's pretty much a given that it will be easiest to develop (at least initially) in the language & framework that the developer already has experience with. Also, .NET has some amazing development tools on Windows - Visual Studio, ReSharper, etc. - and there's a huge pool of experienced C# and ASP.NET developers you can hire, though few of them will know Linux/Mono.
Also, StackOverflow uses ASP.NET MVC :)
To introduce a little levity...
How about DOS on Dope: the last MVC web framework you will ever need?
There are of course a dizzying array of choices but another nice alternative is Django.
It is basically Ruby-on-Rails for Python so most of the comparisons of RoR vs. ASP.NET MVC would apply. Depending on what kind of site you are building, the really interesting feature of Django is the automatic admin interface.
If you need to be up and running quickly, I would go for RoR. Scaling rails is becoming easier with time and you have a big range of ruby runtime environments to choose from MRI 1.8, 1.9, REE 1.8, JRuby (run on java VM), Rubinius.
ASP.NET MVC is nice, but I still think it has some way to go before it offers the same speed of development as RoR.
we have a mixed development environment using ASP.NET MVC and Ruby on Rails. We have come from a purely C# / ASP.NET background, but now have some rails experience and we love both. Problem is deciding at the beginning of a project which one to use can sometimes be tricky.
Any tips for how to explain to the non technical members of our company and our clients why we would chose one over the other for various projects?
Thanks in advance.
Deployment? Rails is interpreted, ASP.NET MVC requires compiling.
Speed? One's bound to be faster than the other, I'm assuming (although I cannot be certain) that ASP.NET MVC would be slightly faster as its compiled.
Platform? ASP.NET MVC obviously has to run in a Windows environment, whereas Rails could run on *nix/Windows/Mac
Development time? You're all going to be more familiar with the constructs of one system over another meaning one will take you longer to develop in. If speed of development is required, one will be preferable.
To be honest if they are non-technical, why would it matter to them? It's pretty rare for a customer to come and ask for a specific technology, and it sounds like you would be picking for them. Then presumably they would trust you to pick the appropriate technology.
If you have to justify to management, I can see that mattering, though. I have developed mostly with Rails and a little with ASP.Net and I do have a favorite, in Rails. That said, I would just fall back on my default and then just tell them the requirement that requires me to jump to the other technology. They can probably understand most reasons, like the ones illustrated by Kezzer.
Any tips for how to explain to the non
technical members of our company and
our clients why we would chose one
over the other for various projects?
If they're non-technical, I don't see why they would care.
However, you could just tell them Microsoft made ASP.NET MVC while Ruby on Rails was not made by Microsoft.
Or, for which ever one you choose, just tell them it gets the job done the fastest/easiest.
Giving them a good response would require them to be technical (performance, compiling, etc..).
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update: I know there is no one best way to do everything. Sorry for not saying that right off. In the context of the data-access tutorials, if you had to do the project he did in that tutorial, would you do what he did or would use use MVC, if you had to choose one of them?
Update: Is MVC the more appropriate way to program asp.net applications, instead of the tutorials found here:
http://www.asp.net/Learn/data-access/
Original:
I ask, because I initially learned about MVC with Java applications, then things like RoR, and Django. These other projects and companies spoke as if MVC had been around for a very long time, and from what I found out it had. Then Microsoft started putting MVC into the .net framework.
I ask because I don't know how to design things very well and thought I was doing well to emulate what's on the asp.net site with Scott Mitchell's tutorial. I thought that creating abstract layers in a BLL was the way to go until I found out about MVC and now asp.net's MVC.
I honestly don't know what the "right" way is to do things. I just create what I need, but I can't help feel like I am missing something.
Is MVC the correct way to start doing things in large projects, specifically I mean MVC and ASP.NET, but could just as well mean PHP and one of their MVC frameworks.
I'd like to settle on a standard way of doing things...for now anyway.
And, out of curiosity, why did Microsoft only now start doing MVC?
UPDATE: Is MVC better than the current tutorial set on asp.net?
I'm referring to the Scott Mitchell tutorials where he creates the BLL for abstraction. Or is that a linq question as well. I should have said that I understand the need for keeping logic and presentation separate but unsure the best way to do it. I was using the asp.net tutorials. It worked fine. Then I found out the rest of the world, as I saw it anyway, was using MVC. Then Microsoft started developing MVC, so to me the other method seems obsolete and the wrong way to do things.
No, it's not the only best way to do things.
MVC is just a design pattern. The goal of all design patterns is simplicity. So as long as it makes your design simpler, go with it. If it makes things more complex for your specific application, try a different approach.
Unfortunately, some people think if they see a pattern, they should use it. It's just not true. Design patterns don't inherently make your application better. They are not an end. They are a means to an end (which is simplicity). So you should use them only if they are worth it.
In my opinion, over-architecting things without a good reason is worse than writing code without any specific design.
EDIT: Regarding ASP.NET MVC: I have a negative personal bias toward ASP.NET Web forms. Before MVC, I did most of the dynamic aspects of advanced projects by writing custom handlers to have fine grained control over the HTML. Web Forms make Web development very easy but they have particularly a couple things that are good but sometimes are problematic. The first of which is ViewState and the second is complex WebControl architecture. Don't get me wrong. Those are signs of brilliance of ASP.NET. I haven't seen a single platform for Web development as easy as ASP.NET Web Forms and this is only because of great WebControl support which requires ViewState. However, in some projects, you want to have precise control on rendered HTML (specially when you have some client-side logic). You also want to make server side code maintainable in large projects. In those areas, ASP.NET MVC really shines. But I think ASP.NET Web Forms will remain a great technology where it's more applicable. After all, as I said regarding design patterns in general, you should carefully evaluate your design to see which one better fits your needs.
Specifically, about data access, MVC usually requires more code than Web Forms counterparts. For presenting tabular data (i.e where GridView is applicable), I think ASP.NET Web Forms is the easier way to accomplish things. However, most data driven Web apps are not just manipulating a table directly in a database. They have complex layout. StackOverflow is a great example of this. It is certainly data driven, but ASP.NET MVC better suits it.
There is no "right" way to do things without knowing what "things" are. MVC is a design pattern that solves a specific common problem - separation of presentational and domain logic. Every design pattern is a commonly accepted "good" solution to a specific problem.
Those solutions, combined with knowledge and experience are building blocks for a good design. The "right" way to do things is to study your problem domain, research on possible solutions and apply the set of solutions that work best to solve it. Making mistakes is a part of the process as well, so don't be afraid to experiment and then refactor with rigor until you reach the solution that serves you best.
MVC is the worst way to develop applications, except for all other ways that have been tried. :-)
Joking aside, MVC is one application design that encourages us not to write spaghetti code. It's a guideline that reminds us to keep business code separate from presentation code. This is very helpful as the application gets more complex.
There are other variations that achieve that same benefit, but are not strictly the same as MVC. Presentation-abstraction-control (PAC) is one example.
As for why Microsoft is so late in adopting MVC, I'm not surprised that they are. They are pretty well-known (at least in recent years) for being conservative instead of innovative. They prefer to let other smaller companies take the risks in an unproven market, then they learn from the mistakes, churn out an overengineered competitor solution, and dominate through marketing.
Example: Microsoft Internet Explorer was considered to be a latecomer to the browser market. Netscape had become very popular, leading the way in providing a platform for people to view HTML. Once the amount of HTML content on the Internet was at a useful level, Microsoft belched up their onomatopoeic "IE" product and quickly captured an overwhelming market share.
MVC is just one way of doing things. I like it because it helps to promote extensibility and is structured to allow testing and code reuse. There is no silver bullet, one true way to do everything but I use it quite often.
In regard to Microsoft, I would say that they adopted the pattern as an alternative to WebForms development for the reasons I mentioned above. I would recommend looking at Rob Conery's MVC Storefront and kind of play around with the examples to see how it works for you.
There is no "best" way to code things. It depends on the application in question; sometimes MVC is the right choice, and sometimes it's not. A good developer is able to weigh his/her options and choose the one that's best suited for a task at hand, instead of just going with the method du jour
If MVC solves the Primary Technical Imperative of managing complexity in your application then it may be a good solution, but it is by no means the only solution.
MVC is one of any number of design patterns. Whether it's the best technologically, or the simplest, or for what types of projects it's appropriate, are are all arguable (see other SO threads). In any case, few would argue against the prevailing consensus that for most cases, it's "Good Enough".
But it has the undeniable benefit that a lot of people use it, on a lot of different platforms.
So if you want to use a methodology that is likely to be around a while; or you don't want to depend on one vendor for support and extension and refinement; or you work in a group that would like to grow by hiring people from various backgrounds who will grok a shared methodology quickly; or you would like to maximize your opportunities to move on if you need to, then MVC is one of the very best ways to support those goals.
MVC being "Better" or "Worse" pattern is relative to the project.
I really like the fact that Microsoft has taken a commitment to bring MVC to the Web. To this end, I have become excited about converting one of my existing ASP.NET apps to MVC and wanted to know if I may be jumping the gun. While this site is using MVC, it's still technically in beta...what are your thoughts?
From Preview 5 to RTM, there will be less and less breaking changes. So if the concern is how much churn your project will face, it shouldn't be as bad as it was with earlier releases.
If the concern is support, we do ship the source code and you're allowed to modify (but not redistribute) the source for your own needs. In most cases, we've heard from customers that they didn't have to change the source to work around bugs, instead opting to use our extensibility hooks.
Since Stack Overflow is written in asp.net mvc and it's in production, it looks like it's production ready :)
Yes, it is built on the foundation of ASP.NET (caching, authentication, etc) so it isn't having to deal with rewriting/stabilizing all those lower level pieces.
I have it in production and it has been very solid from a runtime perspective.
I re-coded my site using the Preview 5 of ASP.NET MVC and I completely fell in love with it. I would not, however, convert any existing applications to it until it's in Go-Live. Too much could possibly change...