ASP.NET MVC framework - ready or not
Following a 1 hour presentation by Scott Hanselman and Eilon Lipton that I attended yesterday at Dev Connections
One of the key point to understand about the implementation of this framework is that it is a new behavior that is different than the regular web form (postback oriented) as it actually doesn't have viewstate and no postback usage,
This actually mean that if you would like to create an application you will not be able to use your current web controls and you would probably have to create the logic by your own (or wait for future vendor's implementation (in the demo we saw a very basic usage of old ASP style inline coding :( )
I asked Phil (PM of MVC) how would he implement a real life scenario application that holds few parts on the page (actually each part should have its own controller) and sadly he could not answer this yet (this is perfectly ok because this is not even a CTP) but sadly he said that in the near CTP that will be shipped at December we will not have support for sub controllers and this means that we would not be able to actually use it for more complex applications.
in general I think that this framework is in the very first stages and have a lot to evolve (and I guess it will change a lot in the future).
The above kinda make me think about the entire framework and I came a long of few points:
- Currently I don't think that in the next 6 months this framework will be able to be implemented on a real life application as I described above.
- I think the name should be changed to something like "RESTfull behaviors" (apparently Dino Esposito also think almost like me :) ) because that is the main concept presented and this drive the entire solution
- I think that there will have to be a change to the framework to allow it to connect (encapsulate) into existing pages and user controls and take advantage of the rich web controls.
thanks
3 comments:
Ill keep you posted, but i will have a 'real world' application out the door within 6 months of the release of the framework..
What does real world mean anyway? I keep hearing that terms directed quite often towards people like Scott who make life easier for the rest of us.
You are no the first to asked me that, well in my opinion a real life application is simply an application that will incorporate few sections on your panel that communicate with one another and each part is reusable, i guess one of the part is a complex type that contain tab control (meaning lots of data).
An example of such application is something my team developed for User Management of our solution and it includes:
1. Group panel - shows hierarchy of groups on tree that you user can select, the panel also contain some action that the user can do on the groups (E.g. Delete, new, edit, etc)
2. User list panel - shows the users of the selected group (but can shows a general user list if it is being reused in another place)
3. User details panel - shows in a tabular way all the details of the selected user(s) (contain lots of information) and it supports update and few more actions.
you surely see that each panel talks with one another for example:
1. When user select a group the 'users panel' is filled with child users and the 'user details panel' is cleared.
2. when selecting a user in the 'users' panel' the 'user details panel' get filled with all the user details (by using the model and controller to fetch the data).
3. When pressing on action (E.g. Delete user) in the 'users details panel' than it is being removed from the 'users list panel' (re-fetched)
So as you can see this is a fairly true scenario and there are more out there
Keep me posted and thanks for the comment
Hi, Ran
I have the same concern as you do. In my view, ASP.NET MVC is not designed to handle the type of data intensive application you mentioned. I like Nick Berardi's decision matrix about when to use Web Forms and when to use MVC. Here is the link http://www.coderjournal.com/
Basically, for data-heavy application, forget about ASP.NET MVC. I bet that your users will be very mad if you ever manage to develop such a lame UI using ASP.NET MVC. Users love to see those apps behave like a Windows app, not like a web page.
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