I am developing a asp.net mvc site that depends deeply on a 3rd party web service.
I would like to know what is the best approach to develop this site since the web service is not ready yet and I can't wait it to be ready to start developing.
I am using Specflow and selenium to drive my development.
What you forgot to say is if the 3rd party web service is written by you or your collegues, or if it's completely external.
Anyway, it's still possible to work in parallel. What you need to do is to arrange reunions with the people designing the web service, and obtain/negotiate their specifications, and design interfaces for their service. These interfaces should not be subject to enormous changes afterwards, during the service development.
Once you have them, you can do your job in parallel. But if you can't have them, then forget it: You can't work.
Related
I have a standard nteir setup :-
Web server -> App server -> DB server
I have an MVC 5 web application sitting on the web server with controllers calling a WCF services project sitting on the App server. WCF services project uses EF6 to marshal data on the DB server.
I am wondering if WCF is overkill? Is there is an easier way to achieve this same architecture? I am thinking I should have gone with Web API on the app server and then just call the web API from the controllers with the HTTPClient?
Or, I could even just use a plain MVC project on the App server returning JSONResults to the MVC controller on the web server?
It depends...
You have to understand what are the benefits of each set up. This is not exhaustive, just a quick brain dump. This should give you some hints to look further as in the wild world there might be many more reasons for choosing one or another solution.
Why WCF. Are you going to have different clients to your backend ? You need some entreprisy security between clients and you backend ? With WCF you could configure Http, TCP endpoints, set message or transport security and a lot more. It could be needed for example if your doing an intranet application and you would like not only to have your UI (MVC application) but other systems going to it. If this is not needed WCF seems overkill here.
Web Api is also agreat choice if you would like to built more REST oriented api, enabling content-negotiation for different clients (different media-types). Building REST is not about issuing JSON, it's much more and this would be too long to explain it here. If your client is not only your MVC app, but you could have a need for a api for other mobile devices, OAuth authentication and the so, this could be a good way to do.
Plain MVC app would also fit if you don't have any special needs, go for it. No overhead needed. Keep It Simple And Stupid.
I hope this helps
I would not change this.
WCF is a good choice for communication between Web Tier and App Tier. I would never put my App Tier exposed to outside world, so if there is any communication to my app from outside world, it would be through Web tier only and if there is a need to support multiple clients, I would create a WebAPI on web tier and expose that.
I would keep App tier only available to Organization internal and with WCF I would have flexibility to write service code and contracts which can then be exposed over various bindings (transport, security, etc.).If you are building a service in your organization and plan to support multiple protocols, or simply use protocols other than HTTP (tcp, name pipes, udp, etc.) then WCF is indeed a good choice.
I'm developing with Azure Mobile Services (using SQL Azure) to provide a backend for both IOS and Android mobile apps and a PHP website.
My question is now that now custom apis have been introduced is it considered best practice to wrap everything up in custom api calls rather than e.g. using the CRUD table operation scripts directly from apps or websites?
Additionally for data access from a website should you lock down access to stored procedures and only exec via custom apis, to enforce a consistent approach no matter who the consumer is?
While I appreciate that custom apis and the table scripts are restful it still isn't clear how to architect a solution in the most efficient, reliable way that can enforce business rules in only place allowing each process only one entry point e.g. you have a stored procedure exec'd by an api called from the mobile apps. If the website calls that stored procedure directly without going via the api it could have unwanted side effects because other logic steps will have been missed.
I'm relatively new to Azure so forgive me if I have just missed something fundamental here. I've read many blogs and tutorials but they rapidly go out of date.
Many thanks
In my opinion the great feature of azure mobile services is the push notifications (to ios, android, wp). If you are not going to use that, there's no great advantage to use WAMS
(Windows Azure Mobile Services).
But it's a good choice using Windows Azure as backend since it's easy to scale up /down. In this case, you could create a Webapi and host in a Web Role. As it works with http, you can easily create Restful services and call them from your apps (ios / android).
General question:
If I wanted to develop a web site, say ASP.NET MVC (the only web framework I am familiar with), is it generic enough so I can use it to have later apps for iOS, Android, obviously Windows Phone?
I mean I will need to connect somehow to SQL server that is the backend of the ASP.NET MVC web site etc. What are technical difficulties & considerations I need to take into account so that app is generic enough.
Note that I am planning it to be multilingual and will use ASP.NET resources to support that.
Or should I learn completely different framework to have it generic over multiple platforms?
Thanks in advance!
ASP.Net is generic enough. You can expose REST endpoints (although WebAPI is probably better to do that, but you can run that alongside, and consume from, MVC), create full user interfaces, etc.
However, if you are planning a write-once, run-anywhere application to avoid having to develop native device apps (e.g. Android and IOS), make sure to take the time to read this excellent (but long) article.
The MVC framework can definitely be used for mobile devices (when you say apps, I am assuming you mean websites that function as apps), and MVC 4 introduced significantly more support for mobile development, including things like templates (http://www.asp.net/whitepapers/mvc4-release-notes#_Toc303253809).
MVC is a move to a less heavy handed framework than, for example, Webforms, and it should give you the flexibility to develop for any device. However, it does also open you up to coding yourself into some problems if you approach it in the wrong way, so make sure you are familiar with the framework before trying to develop some super next-gen responsive web app.
You can expose your ASP.NET MVC controllers to other platforms, like web services or Web API, so the client, IOS, Android or anything else can call your services.
I have a database on a database server. No web service in place to be consumed by a web application.
If I want my iOS app to communicate with a database server (send & receive data), I know I can create a web service and then call that service from my iOS app. But what web service is recommended for this? Should I just write a .asmx web service in .NET or should I go for MVC WEB API or may be go for WCF ?? I have spend hours doing research on this. Please help.
A lot will depend on where you expect the service to be hosted, and what technology stack(s) are supported by the host. If you are self-hosting, then do whatever works in the technologies you know and understand. If you want to use a host that targets its services to small-to-midsize independent development teams, many providers like Heroku support things like Rails services. PHP is always an option as well. Microsoft-based solutions and Java-based solutions tend to be more widely used in larger enterprises and data centers, and if that's where you'll host your service then these would also be good options. And of course I'm speaking in broad generalities here: For any general trends I might list here there are lots of exceptions where other approaches make sense.
If you'd rather let the decision be driven by what makes things easiest for your iOS code, I would recommend you start with server-side technologies that support REST-ful interfaces using JSON to represent your service's resources. REST-ful services are very easy to consume from iOS, and JSON-based representations of resources are very easy to parse and produce in Objective-C.
I am personally used this approach to set a direction for my app. For the service side, I am going with a Rails implementation of REST-ful web services. I'm a Java developer by profession, but for a small independent project the options for hosting Java services were more limiting than with Rails so I've picked up rails on the side to make my project work. So far it's suited my project quite well.
I have a winform application that controls some transmitters and sound cards. There is a requirement to be able to provide a web interface for controlling those devices.
Currently I use WCF to communicate from the controllers in my asp.net MVC site to the winform app. That works well, but there is now a desire to move the hardware to another machine when needed and that means that IIS has to be installed and set-up on that machine.
I know it isn't that hard, but I won't be the one actually doing the moving. It will be the users. If I could host the site from the winform app them it would basically be portable besides the hardware drivers need for a usb to serial converter we use.
Can you use a windows service? The whole winforms app as a service doesn't seem right to me. It assumes that the app is always running. I would create a windows service and expose WCF endpoints from that.
You will need to install IIS or Cassini to host the MVC web site. There's no way around that.
Huh, I would go with Greg's answers.
Also, making your app IIS dependant is not that bad. Or Cassini dependant. You don't want to end up writing your own webserver, which could easily happen when you continue to add features to the app.
I don't know about you but it just feels you are taking all the load on yourself, you are going to spend possibly dozens of hours to implement it to spare an hour or two for someone who doesn't want to install real webserver.
if you want to host MVC under winforms then i would look into the upcoming .netcore 3 version which should allow this combination.
though you'll have to wait until 2019 Q1
https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/roadmap.md
otherwise i've mostly hosted simper stuff using nhttp library if i want it in a winform app.
(NHTTP is a library that gives you very simple crude http request functionality so no mvc sadly but it works for simnpler stuff)