Editorial: Selecting a .NET Web Framework

The company that I work for (www.skiviez.com -- a men's underwear store, technically safe for work but takes some people by surprise) uses MonoRail. It was a good match for our site, which is not large or terribly complex by any means. It was a rewrite this past summer of an aging clusterfark of classic ASP pages. MonoRail (RC2 at that time) had bugs and quirks, but in general the development was painless, particularly for developers who were coming from classic ASP and PHP. We could control the HTML exactly and we could avoid the complexity of the WebForms model. Now that ASP.NET MVC is on the horizon, I think that we'd have a tougher time choosing a framework than we did 6 months ago.

WebForms, IMHO, is great for Web *applications* (need complex controls? drag and drop those components, yay!) and corporate intranet type sites with complex interactions (e.g., SharePoint plug-ins and such), but it is not so hot for public-facing Web sites, because (gross generalization ahead, and we'll use our site as an example) public-facing Web sites are usually not completely full of forms and do not require spectacularly complex controls. So, avoid the overhead and complexity with an MVC framework. You still get the power of the ASP.NET pipeline and libraries (forms authentication, caching, etc.) without worrying about events and handlers and databindings for a medium that consists of basically just passing arrays of strings back and forth. If the site itself doesn't need to be complicated, let's not use a complicated framework, either.

If you read between the lines, though, we went with MonoRail because MVC was familiar to us. We had no investment in WebForms and, after evaluating it, really didn't care to spend the time learning its intricacies. But if you are at a whole company that is deeply invested in WebForms and you have developers who enjoy using and working with WebForms, then why abandon something that works? I don't think ASP.NET MVC is necessarily a mulligan on WebForms, just a recognition that WebForms is not suited for every type of site on the Web.

Just my two cents!

I've been in the .NET world since .NET 1.0's beta, and in ASP.NET since not long after that. (Almost) no scerious projects will use "plain ol webforms". They simply don't get the job done. The templating engine and the webform architecture is great, but its too "plain".

MonoRail actually is semi-popular. The Web Client Software Factory and other MVP (Model View Presenter pattern) is actually quite popular, and MVP is definately the way to go to make pure ASP.NET apps modular and testable, and its quite the common approach (and many will argue: better than MVC). There has been other semi-mainstream methodologies, such as the application blocks from microsoft.

I guess the misconception comes a lot from how many people came from Java/Strut(or others) early on, not seeing any MVC, thinking there was "nothing" (when MVP has been a recommendation for a while), but if you get hook with a serious project, the odds are good there's some kind of web framework behind it. It is not AS diverse as in other languages, since there's already a semi-complete foundation (the web forms), and thus you don't need to build as much on top of it (as opposed to JSP, that some even completly replace, or a cgi/bin language, which potentialy had nothing at first), but using pure asp.net web forms was never really the answer for anything beyond prototypes...

And the way I see it, MS's ASP.NET MVC is more of a path for people coming from non-.NET world than anything else, as webforms + MVP add a lot that you won't get in an MVC, but Microsoft wouldn't want to alienate potential customers :)