Starting a new project and would like to use one of the MVC framworks. ASP.NET MVC is still in preview but Spring.net is in production and has a history with Java. I'd like to know the general lowdown between the two.
Current questions..
What are the major feature differences?
What about deployment/hosting issues?
Future support? Do you think Spring.net will fade once ASP.NET MVC is in production.
Current Support? I saw the Jeff twitting about a breaking change in the next preview.
Thanks!
I am a little confused by the question. Spring.Net is a dependency injection framework that you can use in ASP.NET MVC. I kind of based my answer off what you are actually asking though. The difference between ASP.NET MVC and another MVC framework that runs in ASP.NET.
If you are worried about using ASP.NET MVC in production since it is not even in beta yet, then you may want to check out MonoRail as an alternate. There are some differences in features, but the two are pretty close in terminology and how MVC is implemented. To learn differences, here is a question that was posted, that you might want to monitor. I think once ASP.NET hits release, that most Microsoft shops will switch to it. With ASP.NET MVC still being developed, you will run into breaking changes that you will have to change when you upgrade to the next release. That goes with the territory of living on the edge. You just need to read the release notes before jumping to the latest release.
I have an impression that Spring.NET never really took off, or at least not as much as Castle Project Monorail.
From what I understand, Spring.NET has also departed from Java Spring's implementation, so there will a steeper than expected learning curve if you are coming from Java. From Spring.NET's overview:
The design of Spring.NET is based on
the Java version of the Spring
Framework, which has shown real-world
benefits and is used in thousands of
enterprise applications world wide.
Spring .NET is not a quick port from
the Java version, but rather a
'spiritual port' based on following
proven architectural and design
patterns in that are not tied to a
particular platform.
As for your other questions, the breadth of the topics make them a bit difficult to answer in one go, but I am hoping Phil Haack will see this question and respond. :)
Yes Spring.net adds enterprise solutions to Microsoft's codebase, Spring will fill the crucial missing gaps.
I can attempt to answer your question on future support of Spring.net & ASP.net MVC. Apparently Spring will be releasing a new Milestone build when Microsoft go RTM/Final build:
http://forum.springframework.net/showthread.php?p=14031#post14031 (Mark is the Spring.net lead and a Microsoft MVP)
I've heard they don't want to give anything away until then, as they've had enough of Microsoft taking Springs ideas with no recognition.
Current Support for Spring.net & Controller Dependency Injection can be found in MVCContrib
Related
One of the reasons I'm askin this is because a lot of the versus topics surrounding these two frameworks are quite old, mostly before 2008, when ASP.NET MVC was still young. As of now, I'm not quite sure how Monorail would fit a beginner like me, but given my circumstances in which I am unable to use VS 2010, and by consequence, ASP.NET MVC, Monorail seems like the best alternative to WebForms.
I know that for the most part, both frameworks achieve the same thing, but what I'm worried about are the little things that I am unaware of as of yet due to my inexperience.
So, the complete question would be, is Monorail a viable to alternative to ASP.NET MVC in a context where I can only use VS 2008?
I may get flamed for this but I would be very leery of starting a MonoRail site at this point. MonoRail was very nice at one point but at this point the community support around ASP.NET MVC is far greater. Given you say that you are a beginner I would go with ASP.NET MVC even if it needs to be version 2 for the time being. There are a huge number of tutorials for you to get started. Then when you can move to Visual Studio Next and .NET 4+ when the opportunity presents itself.
Once you get a bit of experience if you want to dig into what are no doubt interesting developments in MonoRail 3 you can always do that later.
Does any one know about any real application built on asp.net MVC framework. I am not
talking about opensource projects as I am pretty much aware of it.
I am more interested in knowing about any commercial website like banking, ecommerce
or any other line of business application that's built on this framework.
EDIT:
Clarification regarding opensource. I am pretty much aware of opensource projects and they are great. What I am looking for is commercial business application that's made on this framework.
If you visit What is ASP.NET MVC? and scroll to the bottom there is a list of sites that use ASP.NET MVC including stackoverflow.com.
Yes, I have built a commercial "line of business" application on ASP.NET MVC 1.0. We started development on the site when the framework was in beta; and released the site this summer. We are completely happy with our technology choice. Unfortunately I really can't say much more, as my employer would not welcome it.
I'm not sure about the OP's intent; do you mean to get validation of the MVC pattern for very large codebases, i.e. 200 kloc or larger codebases? I can't give you that, and I doubt anyone else really can right now, because there simply hasn't been time to develop so large codebases since the release of ASP.NET MVC. I would suggest researching MVC in Java, as this is probably where you'll find most older & large MVC deployments.
My usual counterargument to the 'very large codebase' fear is you simply shouldn't design so large monolithic apps anymore -- break up the responsibilities and use a SOA architecture to reduce complexity for each individual area of responsibility.
For a webapp on the .NET stack I'd select ASP.NET MVC again with complete confidence. That said, there are many other good choices in webapp frameworks these days.
In here you can easily find top 10 web sites that are built with ASP.NET.
http://www.findmyhosts.com/top-10-asp-net-mvc-framework-websites/
I'd like to build a CMS site based on Asp.Net Mvc and I want to choose my starting point.
I have seen that there is a lot of interest in the new Microsoft Oxite project also if it seems to be pretty early to adopt it in a production project.
I've also looked at S#arp Architecture but it does not properly compare to Oxite as is just a starting point for general Asp.Net Mvc sites.
For me S#arp Architecture has some advantages over Oxite as is far less complex and it uses Nhibernate for the data access layer.
Oxite code uses Linq2Sql for it's DAL and has already a project in the solution that requires the DB version for VS2008.
Oxite seems to me more blog oriented than CMS oriented but I haven’t looked the code deeply.
Here are some of the choices that would point me to S#arp Ar. for starting.
Simple clean architecture
Nhibernate Dal
Community supported
Oxite:
Microsoft project
Potential huge community
Early stages but very good code quality
Provider model that permits to easily switch the DAL
If anyone has looked at the code of these two projects please advice on your opinions.
Thanks
Oxite might be feature rich, but the code quality is very low.
I was very surprised when I checkout the code and found controller actions with 100+ lines of very unclean code, tagsoup views, no unit tests, etc.
The criticism has been well summed up in these blog posts:
http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/some-thoughts-on-oxite/
http://codebetter.com/blogs/karlseguin/archive/2008/12/15/oxite-oh-dear-lord-why.aspx
As always, it depends on your needs. It sounds like you need something more CMS based. Oxite happens to have some CMS-like features, but it's not really a CMS. It might be in the future as it's a community project, but right now it isn't (all you can do is add content pages).
We're glad everyone seems to like Oxite overall, but it is pretty early. Not to deter anyone from using it in production, because we do. We run MIX Online on it, but totally understand if you're not comfortable with it. We need a stabilization period. At the same time we also need people running it so we can make it stable. Chicken and Egg I'd say. :)
I didn't get much of a response at my question about Oxite here at SO (found at Oxite: What are you going to do with it?), but it is really new so it'll take some time for people to warm up to it and fully check it out. The architecture of Oxite is really easy to get started with; that's its strongest suit.
I'd never heard of S#arp before I read your question so I'll definitely check it out.
Oxite is well detailed already, entirely negatively.
I'll just add that I've been using S#arp architecture for several months and found it very maintainable and flexible. There's also a very solid, growing and active community of users around it.
It is very clean, and quite easily upgraded to Fluent NHibernate RC 1.0
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So, I've spent enough time using ASP.NET webforms to know that I'd almost rather go back to doing classic ASP than use them. But I'm hesitant to move to ASP.NET MVC until it becomes more mature. Are there any open source alternatives?
The main thing I'm looking for is something that's easy to learn and to get a prototype up and running with. If it's any help, my main preference is a python "mix and match" approach (like say web.py/SQLAlchemy/whatever templating engine suits my fancy at the time).
We have used MonoRail RC2 for our small business's online store for the past 18 months. It replaced a 7 year old disaster of classic ASP pages. MonoRail RC2 has worked well for us, serving an average of ~14,000 page requests per day. It enabled me to develop the site very quickly, was free, and holds up well. For that, I am thankful to the MonoRail team.
I just used the MonoRail bit. I chose iBATIS.NET over ActiveRecord as I had to write creative SQL to maintain compatibility with a 7-year-old turd of a database. So I can't speak for some of the other Castle libraries.
Some advantages of MonoRail include the following:
It's pretty easy to get in there and modify things. For example, the default routing implementation didn't preserve the query string when rerouting (I needed this to preserve backwards compatibility with the old URL formats used by the now defunct classic ASP site for SEO reasons) and it didn't support issuing HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect headers for that scenario. So I implemented whatever the MonoRail interface for that was, plugged it into my config file, and off I went.
It's still ASP.NET, so you can still use Forms Authentication, the totallly awesome HTTP/HTTPS Switcher at Codeproject, and caching.
Relatively few surprises. After working with it for over year, I haven't had too many days where I've cursed at MonoRail. That's a pretty good litmus test. Some of the helper classes (FormHelper) can behave a little strangely, the wizard framework is outright bizarre, and parameter binding can sometimes throw you for a loop, but it doesn't happen often.
Choice of View Engines (templates). I put this here because most people seem to think choice here is a good thing although I usually think that it is not.
MonoRail, however, is not without its problems:
Lack of direction in development. The number of changes between RC2 and RC3 was beyond ridiculous; a lot of protected virtual methods disappeared, a lot of helpers changed (which is a big deal when your view engine isn't statically typed), even the mechanism for unit testing controllers and views changed. For this reason, we're probably just going to stay on RC2 forever. Now that ASP.NET MVC is out, it's unclear how healthy the community behind MonoRail will stay (though ayende and hammett are as enthusiastic and active as ever).
NVelocity, the "de facto" view engine for MonoRail (at least at the time that we started development), is a promising templating language with an unhealthy implementation and maintenance outlook. (Does it work? well enough. But being a CTRL+C CTRL+V port from the Java version, don't read the source for that library because your eyes will bleed.)
NVelocity and RC2 shipped with an extremely severe threading bug where multiple users accessing the site at the same time could get served pages intended for the other. It's fixed in the latest release (which, due to the release nature of the Castle projects, is very difficult to upgrade to), and we managed to work around it. But it was a very disturbing and unexpected issue to encounter, one that would be highly unlikely to be encountered on a Microsoft framework. Caveat emptor.
MonoRail provided an excellent opportunity for us in June 2007 by giving us a way to migrate an existing site on the Microsoft stack to the .NET platform in a way that avoided WebForms (which is great for intranet sites, but not so great when you need fine-grained control of your HTML output on a public-facing Web site, in my opinion). (Fine, the real reason is I just despise the WebForms postback model.) ASP.NET MVC was not even a gleam in Microsoft's eye at that point in time.
Now that ASP.NET MVC does exist, however, and given that Microsoft is positioning it as an alternative to WebForms, I know that I personally will strongly consider it for any future project. MonoRail is a great project, it served us well, and I'm grateful to the open source community for it, but I think of it fondly as a heavily used, worn tool that is retired to a lower drawer in my workbench. Without it, ASP.NET MVC might not exist today.
Personally I have tried both ASP.NET MVC and MonoRail by CastleProject. Although I really enjoy the other CastleProject libraries, I have found that I enjoy the ASP.NET MVC implementation model better than the CastleProject MonoRail model. Now that ASP.NET MVC has released that they will be including jQuery in with the releases, I am truly excited. Ultimately, I think it depends on what other libraries you use. If you use NHibernate, ActiveRecord, and Castle Windsor then you will probably enjoy the MonoRail libraries. If you don't use any of those libraries, or prefer the Microsoft Enterprise Libraries (currently the company standard where I work) then you will probably find the ASP.NET MVC fits your needs better. With the focus on ASP.NET MVC coming from Scott Guthrie himself I doubt it will be going away any time soon. In fact, the more people using it and signing it's praises the more likely it is to become the defacto standard.
Another alternative, with which I have no experience, is ProMesh. Personally, I moving to ASP.NET MVC.
One alternative that seems interesting is MonoRail although I haven't tested it out fully.
ASP.NET MVC should start to become more accepted as being mature in rapid fashion. Now that it is beta, and supposedly nearly feature complete, the rate at which people adopt it will continue to grow, and likely more sharply. With the RTM/RTW release promised to be in the near future, now is the best time to start to adopt it so that you can hit the ground running with it.
If there are specific shortcomings that you see in ASP.NET MVC, you should definitely let Microsoft know about it. Scott Guthrie is very receptive to feedback and the MVC Contrib project is both open to suggestions and has a great collection of enhancements available through their library.
Before I get pointed to one of those 'VS.' questions like below...
ASP.NET webforms + ASP.NET Ajax versus ASP.NET MVC and Ajax framework freedom
Should I pursue ASP.NET WebForms or ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET MVC Web application vs ASP.NET Web Application
... please let me state that I'm not looking for a comparison.
Some of my concerns that I need answers for include:
Is the learning curve for doing crazy UIs (e.g. having UI for building a BOM tree online) steep? Lots of people posting questions seem to be having problems with some UI requirement or another which has me worried. Is the technology mature enough to handle those type of requirements?
Is there a pretty well developed community and how available is online literature? You can get tons of literature for WebForms.
Would the time to develop it be comparable or less to building a traditional enterprise WebForms site?
How long would it take to get a whole team of developers comfortable (if not enamored) with WebForms to become well versed in ASP.NET MVC?
The truth of it I think is that StackOverflow is Google-like product and ASP.NET MVC might be great for that. But I'm stuck developing software in the Your company's app category.
alt text http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/simplicity.png
So taking a plunge could prove very costly later on if something can't be done or it has to be hacked. Hope to hear from those that have taken the plunge.
Thanks.
About 3 months ago, I was told that I needed to develop an enterprise web-app (well, a series of small web-apps actually), but that I could choose whatever technology I wanted.
Since I'm most comfortable with VS/C#/.Net, the dilemma was whether to choose ASP.NET WebForms or ASP.NET MVC2 -- Unlike you, my only background was with Windows Forms (WinForms) and a little WPF. So I had to research (and try-out) both WebForms and MVC.
Just like you, I realized that my app would be neither Google nor Apple like, but your bog standard company app with thousands of buttons and boxes, etc. WebForms seemed like it would be the fastest to deploy, but hard to test and hard to maintain on a long-term basis. MVC seemed to have a much steeper learning curve, but once established, testing and maintenance would be a breeze.
I only fiddled with WebForms for a week, so I can't really comment on it. But MVC is definitely everything I was expecting it to be.
Yes, it's a steep learning curve. Concepts that were new to me:
Model-View-Controller (MVC)
Separation of Concerns (SoC)
Model Binding
Unit Testing and Test Driven Design (TDD)
Mocking and Stubbing
Dependency Injection (DI)
The books that helped me the most were:
Pro ASP.NET MVC2 by Sanderson (MVC, Model Binding, DI, TDD)
The Art of Unit Testing by Osherove (TDD, Mocking, Stubbing, DI)
I also had to brush up on my HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Overall, there seems to be a fair amount of ramp-up work in the beginning, but maintaining and extending the existing application has been pretty painless. Whenever I've been asked to make changes, it's been fairly easy and I've typically been able to deliver on-time or even sometimes ahead of schedule.
In an ideal world, writing an MVC app would happen with 2 people. One person writing the core code and a second person writing the UI and the Views (HTML, CSS, Javascript.) Although it's entirely possible to do it all by yourself. (which is what I'm doing right now...)
I have run into some hitches deploying in the Enterprise, though. Internally, my company is running Windows Server 2003 and IIS6. Unfortunately, we have been unable to get the app to deploy properly on IIS6 when using Virtual Pathing. (All the references to and in the CSS files are broken.) If you plan on deploying MVC, I would recommend using IIS7 or higher. MVC supposedly works on IIS6, but requires that your IT department be willing to figure out how to get it to work.
Edit: I just realized I never directly answered your questions. Here goes:
My personal experience has said, that, yes, the learning curve is steep for building good Models and UIs, but I'm not really a web-developer so I've been working with that handicap. The good news is that the MVC technology is pretty mature.
Yes, the community is pretty well developed and growing. You'll get a lot of good answers from StackOverflow as well as MS's ASP.NET MVC sub-forum.
I have no personal experience coding WebForms, but I have coded plenty of WinForms apps and I feel like it's taken me approx. 3 times longer to build this MVC app. The initial investment is a bear, but regular maintenance and improvements seem to come WAY faster, especially as the app has grown... Since you seem to have a team of programmers, it may come faster for you guys as you can probably split up the learning/workload.
Again, no prior experience with WebForms, but what I can tell you is that as I was learning ASP.NET MVC, there were times when I was struggling to understand what was going on because I had no prior ASP.NET background. (Example: Membership and Role Providers -- I had to code my own recently. Boy was that fun...) On the plus side, I didn't have any "old ways of doing things" (aka. WebForms) to unlearn either. If you have a team of folks enamored with PostBack / CodeBehind, you can bet that MVC is gonna seem awfully strange at first. But hopefully your team will see the advantages that MVC brings and embraces it fully.
Oh, and it should be noted that you can blend MVC and WebForms. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. Although, if I were in your shoes, I'd try to embrace MVC as much as possible and only use WebForms where it clearly makes more sense.
Ok, I hope this helps... :-)
I can answer half of your question. I've just dove into MVC from a WebForms background. There is (obviously) a learning curve, but it's really not very steep. I've been able to make the transition with little effort, and I find the whole thing to be a breath of fresh air.
However, I am quite capable with front-end technologies (HTML & Javascript), and I don't like the HTML the WebForms and Microsoft ajax framework generates. If you and/or your team are like this, you will love it. However, if you are proud of the in-depth knowledge you have of the event hierarchy, or if you love the simplicity of UpdatePanels, then you'll probably bridle against the changes.
The documentation is OK, enough to get going happily, anyway. Here's a few videos to whet your appetite:
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T49F
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T50F
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T44F
Here's your documentation home:
http://www.asp.net/mvc/
For a bit more info, the first chapter of the asp.net mvc 1.0 book is online and can be downloaded for free. See ScottGu's blog here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/03/10/free-asp-net-mvc-ebook-tutorial.aspx
And, the full code for the chapter can be found here:
http://www.codeplex.com/nerddinner
Finally, in terms of development time, I think it might take a bit longer to develop apps using MVC (although I have no evidence of this), but I think supporting, maintaining, bugfixing and enhancing will take a lot less time. So, with a small up-front investment, I think you'll more than recoup that effort.
Anyway, like I said, these are my preliminary findings. I still have yet to hit a really hairy problem.
As you know its all about the people first, technology 2nd. You can simply build out a new functionality of your company app because they can co-exist, then you can answer all those questions yourself.
It's new stuff so it will of course take more time than what you're used to but heck its all fun so jump right in and start answering these questions for your own people and app.
Interesting that your question focused all on your concerns and not on any benefits. Have you asked yourself the "why" question? If you feel you can be successful with WebForms, why change to MVC? What is there in MVC that justifies the risks? If you were paying for the project, what would you do?
I'm not pitching WebForms over MVC by any means, but as an architect, you need to be able to come back very strong to the question of why you decided to go away from a very well-known quantity to a relatively new one. I think that there are many good reasons to do so, but it not my job on the line. :)