Lightweight webdev
- 1. TAMPA C# Group Lightweight Web Development 10/23/2012 Presenter: Damiano Fusco
- 2. What we’ll be talking about • About me • ASP.NET and ViewState • ASP.NET MVC • AJAX • WCF to move towards SOA • Overlaps between ASP.NET MVC and WCF (in some ways) • Does ASP.NET MVC really helps separating UI from Server Side concerns? • jQuery and jTemplates • RESTful WCF with jQuery/jTemplates
- 3. About me Damiano Fusco • Musician: I’ve studied music for a total of 15 years and played professionally for about 12. • Graphic Designer: Always did free-lance work as a graphic designer along with music • Web Designer (briefly): Started creating static html sites when internet was starting to become popular (I had a 28kb modem back then) • Software Developer: Eventually switched to software development about 16 years ago when switching to creating dynamic websites (using Classic ASP and SQL Server 7.0 back then). For about 90% of my career I worked with Web. • Used .NET since 2003 • Recently learned a little bit about Linux and NodeJS using MongoDB
- 5. ASP.NET and ViewState • If you use traditional ASP.NET Web Forms with Server Side Controls, you get ViewState as well. • ViewState is a hidden field on a page that ASP.NET uses to manage control states. • ViewState consumes bandwidth • ViewState has a performance hit on the server (and eventually on the client as well) • Therefore, ASP.NET is not really good for UI. However, ASP.NET can still be used for what is good at on the server side.
- 6. ASP.NET MVC Moved away from ViewState, but framed in the MVC design pattern • Model – Structured data or entity. Usually the design of this is tied to a specific need in the UI. So, it usually means Model for View. • View – Represents a single view, most of the time a single html page. MVC Views are most of the time files with both HTML and server side code (Razor or other view engine). The server will be consuming resources to process Razor or other view engine language. • Controller – We can say that offers ways to link Model to Views with the promise of de-coupling (separation) UI from the backend.
- 7. AJAX Asynchronous Javascript and XML • Not tight to a specific technology, even thought started with Javascript and XML, therefore the name. Mostly used today with JSON instead of XML • It’s a group of web development techniques to facilitate devel of asynchronous web apps. Some define Ajax as a “client” technology, but it’s more than that.
- 8. WCF • Microsoft Framework to build Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) • Evolved from Microsoft Web Services (.asmx) • Nice out-of-the-box features to quickly build services. • Bad: usually hard to configure. But for most common uses there are simpler ways to implement WCF.
- 9. Overlaps between ASP.NET MVC and WCF (in some ways) • We could think of a Controller to really be like a Service in many ways. Indeed, a controller usually returns a view as an ActionResult, or JSON as a JsonResult. • If you ever used Ajax with ASP.NET MVC, you probably found yourself in using the Controller as a service. • In this case, now you are not really following the MVC pattern as originally thought.
- 10. • Nice thing about MVC is also the Url Routing. It truly offers a nice out-of-the-box way to have friendly routes that map to your Controllers and Views. • In WCF most of the time you’ll be doing routing as well with the help of System.Web.Routing and some other .NET namespaces. • In a way we could say that ASP.NET MVC offers a mix of both: services (server side) and UI (views) in the same project, while WCF is really only for services (server side).
- 11. Does ASP.NET MVC really helps separating UI from Server Side concerns? • I personally think ASP.NET MVC frames you in a specific pattern. You can still do Ajax and other things, but that you’ll be not be really following a pure ASP.NET MVC approach.
- 12. jQuery and jTemplates • Most of you probably know what jQuery is. • jQuery is a framework build on top of JavaScript mostly to simplify DOM manipulation (DHTML) but also to simplify Ajax calls to server, and ultimately the promise of Asyncronous Web Apps. • jTemplates, a jquery add-in, can be used to render html views directly in the client (browser) • There are probably other jquery add-ins, but all my experience has been with jTemplates.
- 13. • jTemplates allows you to push to the client the work of rendering your views. • But where are the views? Well, with this approach your views will be really snippets of html stored in .htm files that you’ll be loading when needed through jTemplates. • There are pros and cons with this approach, as anything. The main pro I like is the greatly improved user experience (UX). The main con most people will face is the shift from doing views in Razor with C# to using JavaScript/jQuery/jTemplates syntax and some of the limitations that might come with that. For one thing, you’ll have to love JavaScript. Furthermore, you’ll have to love debugging JavaScript as well.
- 14. • One thing that is above everything else and I’ll repeat once more here is that with jTemplates you’ll be pushing the work to the client browser, while with ASP.NET MVC that work will be done on the server side. From my experience this is usually a good thing, but there might be cases in which you might want to do more of the work on the server and leave the client with much less work to do.
- 15. RESTful WCF with jQuery/jTemplates • A much more lightweight approach is to move towards a SOA. • We can use WCF on the server side to offer a REST API from where we get the data (or perform CRUD operations). This really separate this from anything else much better than ASP.NET MVC • We then use jQuery/jTemplates to make calls to our REST API and render jTemplates views on the client side. Again, this really helps remove the UI concerns from the services concerns.
- 16. • This approach requires more organization and discipline from the developer. You’ll have to constantly make sure you organize your files in a logical way, follow a good naming convention, aim for code reusability also in your jQuery/jTemplates files. • At the same time, this approach offers much more flexibility to break your own rules from time to time, without causing spaghetti code or breaking the main design approach. As long as you are making exceptions to serve a specific need.
- 17. Other advantages • You’ll be able to quickly offer your WCF REST services as an API by hosting them in an ASP.NET Web App. This way you can consume them also from a mobile app or other client. • You’ll be able at any time to move from WCF to another service technology (i.e. Node.js) without having to rewrite you jQuery/HTML • You’ll have much less code to maintain.