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I work in a company where, since I arrived, I had full freedom to use whatever Microsoft technology, pattern and tool in order to develop my applications.
I started to develop all the applications with ASP.NET MVC3 and I currently have 5 applications deployed and working.
The other day I had a meeting with my manager to review all the applications and he realized that my code was completely different than what he expected. He basically realized that I do not use Web Forms and that I use MVC instead. He thought he was just some component/tool and not a totally different approach to programming. He was curious and he briefly studied what ASP.NET MVC was.
After two days he said that I need to convert all the applications to Web Forms and use just Web Forms from now on. He says that MVC resembles the old asp(that for certain aspects is true) and that it takes longer time to develop the application and makes people confused when there is the need to change/maintain the application.
I think it is not true because, after a steep beginning, I got used to the magic of MVC and it eases development, componentization and maintenance of applications.
I said him that Web Forms is too coupled UI/Logic/DAL, after a while the code becomes unreadable and it jeopardizes unit testing. I also shown the possibility to replace the old GridView(one of his main concerns) with the jQuery or MVCContrib grids.
There was no way to convince him. Both for work and personal development I do not want to take a step back to Web Forms, therefore I kindly ask you to tell me the most important points that make MVC "superior" to Web Forms.
Thanks
Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for a manager to give a business-speak-laden version of "I don't understand this, so I want you to do it my way instead." This often stifles progress. (I've actually left jobs in the past for this very reason, managers who refused to allow any development that they personally didn't design.)
However, you also need to keep an open mind on the subject. He may very well have good reasons for this. Supporting the code is a big concern, and while I agree that it's easier to write clean and de-coupled code in MVC, at the same time he might be seeing a market where it's much easier/cheaper to hire farmed out developers at low cost to support a WebForms application. He may have a stack of resumes in his drawer that paint a very different picture between WebForms and MVC.
The best thing you can do, really, is approach both paradigms with a completely open mind. Understand that the rumors of WebForms' demise are greatly exaggerated. So if you really want to convince him of anything, then you're going to have to present a proper and unbiased comparison.
Start with a simple pros and cons list to compare the two paradigms. Make sure you don't skip on anything. If he has pros for WebForms and cons for MVC that you tried to ignore, that'll hurt your case. Evolve that list into some examples, demonstrations, proofs of concepts, etc. Make your argument tactile, give it numbers and tangible values that mean something real to management beyond just "this is a better development strategy." Quantify it.
If you approach this with an argument that says little more than "well, my way is better because it just is" then you're not going to get far. Even if you have a point to make, you have to successfully make that point to him. You have to put it in his language.
This is really less about which development strategy is better and more about communication and clarifying your ideas. After all, if you can't defend your position then from his perspective it's not a good position.
And if you fully clarify and quantify all of this, and it's critical that you keep an open mind about WebForms, then what you've done is given him the information he needs to make an informed decision. That decision may not change. He may still insist on WebForms. But it's his decision. What you're doing here is presenting him with all the pros and cons, all the costs and benefits (both immediate and long-term in terms of re-writing what you already have and ongoing support and all of that). If his decision turns out to be wrong, at least it will have been his informed decision. You won't have kept anything from him.
In the end, he may still insist that you do things the way he understands them. Some managers are like that. But take this as an opportunity for your career to master the art of presenting an argument. It won't be the last time you find yourself doing this.
I would search data or survey result showing superiority of MVC projects rather than telling him how good MVC is. MVC is just more productive way of creating & maintaining quality software. One thing I would like to add is that since UI is completely decoupled with biz logic, it is a lot better to automate code production with code generation tools such as T4 and MVCScaffolding.
WebForms was created to make it easy for WinForms developers to move to web. ASP.Net MVC's main benefits are that it separates out the Model (data), View (HTML,CSS,jQuery) and Controller (logic and routing). This allows different people to work on different parts if needed (separation of concerns). It also is much closer to a true web model, designing using HTML directly rather than this being abstracted away by ASP.Net User Controls. Obviously, in MVC, you have the HTML helpers and can make your own custom helper extensions as well as using DisplayFor and EditorFor templates.
The bosses argument is that many developers will know ASP.Net but not MVC, so it will be easier for others to work on it. However, MVC has been out a while now and many keen developers will have already picked this up or can do very quickly. It's a very clean and powerful way to develop web applications very quickly and easily maintainable in my opinion. ASP.Net of course has its advantages too but you asked "what makes MVC superior" so I've just argued a few benefits of MVC over ASP.Net. This is by no means an exhaustive comparison and hopefully others will add their opinions too.
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A number of the sites I've recently inherited are in various versions of FW-1 (a "light weight" Model-View-Controller framework for ColdFusion.) I have a functional grasp of it as it is in place, but I'm not seeing the advantages of using it in future development yet.
If you would, please briefly share with me specific experiences in which and how using MVC patterns or frameworks in a database driven web-development environment accelerated the development over what would have been possible in a more linear component function system.
If for moderation purposes only a technical question that can be "answered" is satisfactory, then it is "How does use of MVC patterns or MVC frameworks realistically or in practice accelerate development? (Examples appreciated.)"
I do use FW/1 for almost everything. The balance is done in ancient Fusebox which in some ways like FW/1. For me it has to do with
Encouragement of division of code
After you start doing MVC on any platform, code starts to just naturally divide itself. It is a model, controller, or view? Is this model transient or not? Should the model have a routing pattern? Is this really a view or a layout or a part of a nested layout?
Self documentation
I had over my code to another developer, they instantly know what kind of a thing they are dealing with. It is in certain directory, it has to be a certain kind of thing
Expanded lifecycle
application.cfc has its lifecycle. FW/1 expands it enormously. There are all kinds of places that certain types of code is just supposed to go.
Consistent URLs
The routing patterns defines what kinds of requests will work and which won't. It self-documents the app.
Last but not least
If you don't like all these features, great. Then just tap into the ones you do like. You can ramp up as desired.
I never heard about FW-1, so my answer won't be related with this particular framework. I have experience of CF9 and Railo with ColdBox and Lucee with CFWheels.
All the merits of MVC I found during my work in CFML (I don't want to provide you general answer related with other frameworks I know - Ruby on Rails or Django):
Models are related only with DB staff. Maybe it's funny, but that's how it supposed to be. Sometimes is not. I've seen a lot of legacy code, which meant to be models, but was everything in one place. If business logic in models is isolated from the rest it's easier to test it and maintain it. Also- separated models allows you to use ORM.
Controllers are way much thinner. If you need type less code to do the same job, you'll do it faster.
Templates are only to display what we need, but they don't contain any business logic inside. Keeping it in that manner allows my company to hire front-end engineers, which works on CSS, JS etc. and if they touch CF code, they touch ONLY templates. It would be very difficult for them to deal with all i one applications.
Also I found myself more productive when I know where's find a method which I want to use or simply fixing the bug. If you apply MVC, you can narrow easily possible area of damage when things go wrong and believe- they will.
TL; DR:
MVC makes your development faster, more robust and allows you to split work for different types of developers.
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I'm inheriting a bunch of programs at work where the original author used Microsoft Visual Studio's data components (where a dataset, data adaptor, etc) are creating inside the design environment (from the toolbox or using wizards). This yields some semi-tailored (specialized for the data) classes, and also puts the SQL code into designer generated classes.
This is not how I'm used to doing things (I've always preferred to either unambiguously have a dataset, or create my own specialized class to hold the data and hide the complexity of the underlying data layer).
Does anyone have some good insight or links discussing the pros and cons of using Visual Studio data components?
(A side note, the original author also didn't comment very thoroughly and wrote, for my tastes, a bit too much "clever" code that is not easily interpreted, so I'm not inclined to think he knows any better than I.)
I suppose another way of asking is this: Does using the data designer components result in code that is "following best practices" and is maintainable, etc? It doesn't seem so to me, but I'm looking for input from experts.
[EDIT: Added some more context for clarification of intent]
If I'm right (and it looks like I am) about using designer components really being best suited for prototypes, etc, then I'm going to have to go have some tough conversations with the original developers and my manager. So I'd like to add more emphasis on "links discussing pros and cons" part of my question... I'm looking for something substantial I can use to support my claims that this style of development / code isn't the most appropriate for production use... Thanks.
In general visual components are for throwaway applications, POC's and spike applications, i.e. prototyping. This is for a couple of reasons; they are very quick to get together but a complete nightmare to maintain. I'm unsure of the size of your application but if it were me I would be arguing that in it's current form the cost of ownership will increase with time and therefore would look to more of a DDD style of development. Bin the data layer and replace it with a good solid ORM; NHibernate(preferred) or Entity Framework 4 (easier to get into). Drop that 'clever code' and start using the Kiss, Yagni, dry mantra. It might be difficult to get them to see the light but once it starts costing less they'll love you for it ;)
If you want some more reading in this area look at the following:
Skill Matter are a training facility that run open session and loads of podcast you can watch
A good book for both Dev's and managers to read is Ship IT, it looks at good project practices. As does anything on the pragmatic bookshelf
Martin Fowlers' blog for all thing DDD
Ayende's blog is great place for all things NHibernate
stackoverflow.com, this place rocks
VS data components purpose is rapid application development. From this point of view you can see its pros and cons:
pros: fast development, do not require much coding and knowledge. Good for small applications which will not be changed in a future.
cons: breaks Layer application design logic (add here all pros of such design) combining all in one file.
As a result almost impossible to replace datasource dynamically. Makes more complicated large application support. DI, TDD - it something mysterious using it.
Actually it's a very wide question.
I'd recommend to read more about N-tier application development and Test Driven Development
Hope this help
I wouldn't even go so far as to say that the designer DB components are good for POCs or prototyping. Those components are in Visual Studio primarily as a sales pitch for the framework, so that Microsoft can say "wow, look how easy it is to create a data-driven application with .NET!" They should have been removed years ago, IMHO.
However, don't confuse the designer components with ADO.NET (i.e. DataTables, DataSets, DataReaders, DataAdapters etc.) itself. Since the app you've inherited was built around the designer components, that means that it was also fundamentally built around the ADO.NET components. You can (and should) get rid of the designer components, but you shouldn't necessarily get rid of ADO.NET as well.
I personally think you are definitely on the right track, BUT imho it really depends on what you already have and what the plans are for the future of the product.
I have seen production code that uses just as you are talking about and works fine, and is somewhat easily maintainable.
There are even some great drop in modules from very large companies such as Telerik that fall into the same category of development that you are talking about.
I think what really is an important factor to your employer is: what can you use to get the job done in the fastest most efficient way. I would say that in general though, the "drag and drop" tools straight out of the box are not very good for long term enterprise level applications.
Here is an article by Charles Petzold that may provide more "expert" credential information for you.
http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html
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Programmers often serves as a designer of user interfaces. You could argue whether it is good or not. However, especially in small companies, it is a reality that does not change.
What do you think personally as a programmer, is it our work to design UI? Personally I think that not, especially when you are going to work on Web Applications, where they made you to design UI also.
****Correct me if I am wrong.****
In an ideal world there should be a UI designer, just as there should be a DB designer, etc.
However, this would mean that even the shortest projects run by the smallest companies would need a team of at least 3 (or more) people. Because of the cost that this would incur it's never going to happen.
On small projects you are going to have to double up job functions in fewer people. It's a fact of life.
From a pragmatic point of view I think that all programmers should have an understanding of the basics of UI design, if only to be able to spot a bad one and do something about it. I also think that programmers should have an understanding of DB design as well.
You should look on this as an extra skill set you have which will give you more options when looking for new career opportunities in the future.
A GUI designer should design user interfaces. This is a different skill set. Of course, there's no reason why you shouldn't have someone in your team capable of performing both roles well, but it is important to recognise that the roles, and skills required, are different.
Should a programmer design User
Interfaces?
Only, If you're working in a small company or freelancer - one man army with limited team-size, where you often have to wear different hats of a programmer, tester, QC and the UI designer. This would not be the case for larger companies, where teams are large and responsibilities are divided horizontally or vertically.
Personally, I prefer working on projects where I have a view of the full application stack, so, for a web app, I'd hope to work on the UI, presentation, business and persistence layers.
I like to fully develop a 'feature', rather than a layer - it makes the work feel more real; but then I'd say that I'm probably not typical in that regard.
Also, I've found on projects where the work is divided by layers that there's (necessarily) a much bigger overhead in agreeing on the interfaces between different developers work. Arguably, of course, that's a good thing, because extra up-front design can only improve things, but I found that huge amounts of time were wasted with people waiting for others, and fixing thing that broke from a seemingly innocuous change.
Of course, there is a very different skill set, so you either need good all-rounders (who are probably less good at the minute detail of individual areas), or strong leaders for each technology. But I think the payback is fewer integration issues where everyone's code works perfectly, just not all together!
Some Web Application requires some good designs, you are right at that point. Thats because there are designers. For example, I am really bad at design. A programmer should have own Design Patterns on coding :). Of course, if you have a good idea on how to design, it should be good for you. You can both write & design your UI however you want. Be pro on coding, let designers design your UI :)
Good Luck
You have answered your own question i think, i have worked in companies where i would not be doing this and also companies where i would.
If you work on line of business apps the UI may not be a top priority and therefore a programmer is usually capable of this task.
I think a programmer can design UI well given the correct training. My university had UI classes, and there are short seminars / training classes out there today that hash over the basics of good UI Design. The important thing is to know your customer well, and the real use of your website - keep in mind that this may differ from your intended use. I.E. you may have intended one type of user to use your site in a very basic way, but it turns out it has become a favorite of expert users, so the UI needs to support that.
Often times your buying customer, if you are offering "solutions" rather than "products", will dictate large portions of the interface, right or wrong, so the affect of your design expertise is limited anyway. The important skill to have here is communicating the whys of your interface, and the why not's of theirs.
Programmers, generally, design horrible UIs.
I think the ideal here is a UI designer with some programming knowledge. While they will focus on the user's experience, they'll also know how certain UI decisions may have a big impact on the underlying implementation.
It depends. In a small company, of necessity programmers will also be designing UIs, so yes, it is your job. In a larger company, there may be others on the team whose job is to design the UI, so then no, it isn't your job.
The question here isn't "should programmers be responsible for designing UIs". In some jobs they will be, in others they won't. Some programmers enjoy designing UIs and are good at it, others don't. If you personally do not like designing UIs, then you should take jobs where you are responsible solely for writing code and not designing UIs. If you are currently in a job where you are being asked to design UIs and you don't want to do that, time to talk to your boss to see if there is someone else who could do that function. Say you don't feel UI design is a strength of yours and you want the company's product to be as good as possible, therefore is there someone else who could help design the UI? If there isn't, start looking for another job that better fits your skills and inclinations.
The team I work in is very small so we are all involved with the full software lifecycle, although we do have a dedicated QA team too.
Ideally not, but it's mostly better than the client designing the UI.
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I'm facing developing a new web app in the future and I'm wondering how to decide what framework to use. I've settled on Python as my language of choice. But there are still may frameworks to choose from! More generally how do you choose between different similar technologies that are still in the works as the latest round of web frameworks are? I'm curious what your process is for deciding on technologies you've never used.
Recognize that no choice is perfect -- or even very good.
No matter what you choose, someone will have a suggestion that -- they claim -- is better.
No matter what you choose, some part of your tech. stack will fail to live up to your expectations.
The most important thing is "shared nothing" so that the components can be replaced.
After that, the next most important thing is automatically-generated features to reduce or prevent programming.
Look at Django. Lots of automatic admin features make life very pleasant.
There are a number of things you can do:
Download the frameworks and build something similar with them for comparison.
Look for comparisons by other people, but attempt to understand the bias of the reviewer.
Observe the community at work, see what people are building and the issues they run into when using the technology. Forums, blogs, mailing list etc are good places to check out.
Go to conferences and meet like minded developers interested.
You can also take the approach of using stable versions rather than alpha bits. After a while you might move closer the bleeding edge. People associated with the project in question are generally more biased than those approaching from other platforms, be careful who you trust.
Consider the impact of using a bleeding edge framework versus an established one. Sometimes it's important to your customers that you are on one perceived as stable. At other times this doesn't matter. How comfortable are you with fixing the framework itself? Great developers will learn the internals, or at least know enough to keep things moving whilst a bug is sent to the framework mailing list etc.
Consider some general best practices in building abstractions and reusable code on the python platform. You may be able to save yourself some work in moving to another platform. However, don't be a reuse junkie as this can limit the effectiveness of your use of the framework. The 37Signals guys are right when they talk about extracting frameworks from working code rather than building frameworks from scratch.
I know this is an old posting, but I am in a similar situation (again) and I think there are other people who may want to look for different opinions, and hear of (somewhat) successful experiences.
Since baudtack mentioned Python, I will try to answer this along the lines of my experiences using Python. Here is what has been working for me:
determine the scope of your project - outlining what your application is supposed to be able to do without introducing any programming or design notes will clarify your goals greatly
determine how you would like to work with your code, stack and data:
a. what sort of programming paradigm do you want to work with? i.e. object-oriented, functional, etc. do you want to play to your programming style or do you want to follow somebody else's programming style?
b. use semantic web or not? do you want greater control over URIs and their design? (I found web.py great for this by the way - It is my choice to create REST APIs in Python)
c. do you want to be trapped by framework requirements, or do you want a better separation of the application from the web component, i.e. use a framework to utilize your application as a set of modules, for example. My problem with Django was that I ended up not programming Python, but having to learn more Django than I needed to. If that works for you, then that is the way to go.
d. data stores... some sort of SQL vs. non RDBMS (xml databases like eXist-db with full xquery support) vs. OODBMS vs. a combination of the above? how complicated do you need this to be? how much control/separation do you need to have over how data gets stored and recalled in your application?
e. testing: unit tests... thank goodness for python! if your web app has the potential to grow (as they often do), having a sane and coherent testing platform to begin with will help out a lot in the future - I wish I had learned about this earlier on. oh well... better late than never.
f. how much control over the server do you need? hosting considerations? how much control over an Apache instance do you need to have? OS specific needs? I found that using shared hosting providers like Webfaction has been great. I eventually found I needed greater needs for flexibility and bandwidth. In other words, what can you get for your budget? If you have USD50 to spend each month, it may be better to consider a virtual hosting solution like Linode....
Finally, I echo S.Lott's sentiments that no choice for a solution is perfect, and are subject to obsolescence.
Experience trumps hearsay. I've found that prototyping is a huge help. Make a prototype that uses the features you expect to be the most important for various frameworks. This helps route out any features that may not work "as advertised."
In general though, kudos for being willing to look at new technologies.
I have a set of criteria in different categories:
Activity & Documentation
Is there an active user base?
Is there an active development base?
Is the support responsive and information accessible?
Are there user and development guides and reference material?
These are essential, there needs to be traceability of all of these to build confidence in the solution.
Ease of use
Are basic features easy and complex features possible? I typically give a new framework a test drive and try to roll out a set of use cases to see how intuitive the framework is to use.
Is installation intuitive and simple for a local/dev installation and production deployment?
How is it backed up and upgraded?
What is the effort and UX for implementing a "Hello World" type blog post, static page, menu item, and plugin?
How are versions dealt with for the core & plugins?
Example (on the topic of Automated Testing/Continuous Integration solutions)
Several years ago I evaluated several Automated Testing solution. At the time Jenkins and TeamCity were front runners and in the end I chose TeamCity because of the UX, active user & development base and quality of accessible documentation.
Example (CMS for a blog)
This criteria is also why I prefer to use Wordpress over other options. While wordpress has its shortcomings, the user and development base is strong and active which leads to a software architecture with more potential to evolve over time and maintain its relevance and a development community that provides quality plugins and themes to choose from.
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Note that I am not asking which to choose (MVC or MVP), but rather if one of the two should be used for a web application.
I realize that it might be too much work to convert an older application from its current design to a MVC or MVP pattern. However, what about for a new app? It appears these are the most popular architecture patterns, so should one of these be chosen? If not, what other patterns are there?
If you are not familiar with MVC and/or MVP, a good question to check out is "What are MVP and MVC and what is the difference?". It has many good answers, including links to various websites that break down each one.
MVP / MVC works well in web applications because the HTTP verb + URL combination is a very good way to determine which action to take. There are reasons not to use it, such as if your team has a lot of experience with another framework, but I would generally recommend an MVP / MVC framework. Your application will be finished quicker with higher quality.
Both are great options.
I'd go for MVC as it has a wider adoptions and its easier to understand and use to frontend (HTML / CSS) developers.
Also, given the number of frameworks adopting the MVC pattern, chanches are talking with your coworkers in MVC you will talk a well knew language.
Your question was "should I use one of these design patterns".
I'd have to say that that really depends on the scope of your project. On a very large project that has interdependencies with other systems in a large organization with a large budget, I'd say they are definitely worth considering.
I think these patterns are often over-used on smaller projects where they may add unneeded complexity and cost.
The main point of loose-coupling, is so that you can change your DB or UI at a later time, or re-use business logic. Often times, this never happens. You have to realize that either of these patterns will take longer to implement and complicate the code quite a bit. So, I strongly suggest really thinking this over and weighing your options. You can often deliver a better solution faster by using a very simple architecture that gets the job done and reduces complexity!
I have posted the following answer for another question, though it may be more appropriate here.
MVC is good for plain server side scripting. In MVC developers always try to keep the controller very lean. Mainly controller is for just selecting the appropriate model and reflect on the view. But in today's web applications the View part has radically changed and became complex enough to produce a big, fat and messy controller. So now we need a new place to put the user interface's complex control logic. Here the P of MVP comes in that is the presenter. So presenters are responsible for controlling the logic for a particular user interface component. Don't worry the controller is still here, named as Application Controller. Which ultimately responsible for switching between comparatively larger application components. So MVP can also be said MVPC(!!). BTW this was my way of understanding MVP and obviously not any ground rule.
So I am already tend to MVP for complex web apps.
It depends on the framework you're using. Just use what it supports.
Most web frameworks I've seen use the front controller pattern and call it MVC or MVP.
I think that you should. They are harder to implement, especially in MS world because they did everything to push Web Forms and make building web applications more easily.
Using them you are programming straightforward and you feel like you've done a lot of work. But they are slower and harder to maintain after your site gets bigger.
Using MVC and MVP allows you to separate model(basic classes that represent domain you are working with), controller and views. The best thing about that is that you can reuse your model in other applications like mobile applications or windows apps. They then have more in common than just a database so you have to write less code. You just have to write controllers and views.
I am new to this but I see benefits because when I had to change something on one place something else crashed elsewhere(so you also have to get loose coupling into account and writing unit tests). Writing tests is impossible in Web Forms.
However, if you are building application to represent a person or a company, where there is no business logic on the web, and you have to do it fast, Web Forms are good for it. And also for building prototypes so you can show what application will be able to do when finished.
I like both patterns. My best practice is to choose an pattern, that is always better then NO pattern.
I've developed many applications on both patterns, my personal feeling is that when you are an RAD developer and you are not so good with CSS & javascript(Mostly winforms developers who want's to create an webapp, no offense ;-) ) You should use the MVP pattern because this is very easy to use with the Web Application Projects.
But when you known allot of CSS & javascript then you should consider the ASP.NET MVC pattern.
I would prefer the MVC Pattern, just because the loose coupling. There is a clear seperation between model, view and controller and through the isolation it`s better suited for Test-Driven Development or just Unit-Testing.