IT-Box

Finally, for a few weeks ago my company’s CMS project named ‘WebSayfam’ released locally for Turkish folks. The video below describes briefly on the fly page editing work flows (Interface language is Turkish for now).

Some of the core features of this project are:

• On the fly page editing, by ‘remind me’ option.
• SEO friendly URLs
• One application, multiple domains (does not require installation per domain on the web server)
• Enchased content module api (only implement IModule then deploy it)
• Fully flexible template access ( can bu user defined) and multiple template mastering.
• Template changes do not cause content lost. Only the look and feel changes.
• Drag ‘n Drop content replacement, fully integrated AJAX content management on the fly.
• So so so, i don’t want to advertise this product, i only share it’ features.

Behind the scenes the project is built on top of .Net Framework, Ms Sql Server, Nhibernate, Prototype Javascript framework. The core idea behind the project was that “build one application, handle hundreds of domains on the same web server” so we design software to be global on IIS. To do this task we implemented IHttpModules and IHttpHandlers to filter domains which uses CMS application and generate relevant contents with the manipulaion of HTML templates then registered them to machine level web.config file while loading required assemblies to the GAC. This approach solved our centric application model then we all pay our attention to the core development. While coding the project the most difficult part had became keeping module states inherited from IModule interface. And we get over this problem by binary serializing modules into the database and NHibernate helped us much with deserializing modules easily as it is.

Sorry for poor video, but i wish if it helps for some imagination with my brief explanations. I only wanted share our approach to this CMS application model and get feedbacks from you. Hope this helps some inspirations to you to share us.

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There is an old Turkish saying that

The fly is small but it nauseates

There are few development flies in ASP.NET platform such this fly story. In general these issues slow down the web development processes and produce dirtiness in code and HTML output. I think interpreted server side scripts like PHP can deal this problems more clearer and cleaner way.

Initial Post-Compilation Delays

If you work in small projects i doesn’t disturb so much at the begining but when your project get more enterprise with O/R mappings, logging libraries, security enviroment and web services testing your code with continues bug fixes become a real pain. Every time you compile your code it costs lots of seconds with initial execution and finally these seconds take your so valuable time. It’s a well known and common issue but it disturbs if your code has growed a lot.

Session Variables Losts

If your web project is released and used by many users, some critical and important data in session variables losts by an urgent update or bug fix in application, even when you make a change in .aspx files. This effects users experience with your application and it’s a disturbing issue too.

Postaback Design Issue

In traditional web development data transfers supplied by various form POST and url GET methods by a simple usage. They have cleaner way to sending data to server side. But when postback pattern in ASP.NET came into our life which simply combines javascript and encrypted form data states stay in hidden form inputs named viewstate, all our simple data transfer methodologies blured and became more complex. You lost in the questions such “Should i use querstrings or POST data or postback data?”. Think that you have a relational database project such an e-commerce application and you want to reference a product in Products page with a link from Orders page. If you all use postback pattern in your design, your code become more complex with a few code additions for querystring parameterizing. Probably you felt into these doubts such these problems.

On the fly Updates and Critical Bug Fixes

Suppose that it’s Sunday and you’re getting a calm day on the sofa by the televison, but suddenly you got news that your application felt down at that night and you have to get over that crash as soon as possible. You don’t have any chance or boss tolerance for any customer lost. But the real bad thing is your all source code is at work with your favourite IDE Visual Studio and you don’t have a chance to debug your application unless you get to work with office’s key. If your application was a PHP project the only thing you need is FTP keys. This is a small example, and can be produced more over on likely situations.

Web Standarts and AJAX

It’s very important point that web developers want to take control over the pure HTML input and output. With ASP.NET, it’s structure and it’s web controls always force to use us postbacks, viewstates, none sense table datas, invalid XHTML output. There is an option in web.config about XHTML conformce but it’s not enough. You will say that you can implement postbackless applications but it is again time consuming. And again if you want to use pure AJAX / JSON callbacks or use javascript frameworks like Prototype or JQuery, postback structure that forced you to use by ASP.NET doesn’t let you make things clearer and cleaner. It plays with it’s own rules like ATLAS etc.

Although all these problems for me seems small , they cause big headeches if they iterate a lot and you may get tired of coding web applications with ASP.NET like me. I really get bored of developing web applications in ASP.NET such jumping variables on postbacks one to one and binding data to that useless grids. I now hate postbacks and viewstates and i think the clearest and cleanest way for web development seems PHP with new OO features.

All around these thoughts, neither PHP nor Ror can be as powerful as dotnet platform. I will be waiting for ASP.NET MVC Framework. At least when it shiped to us we won’t have to play with postbacks, and have full control over HTML.

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