Karl Seguin (hey, that sounds like Carl Sagan!) posts about his .net wishlist:
Thinking beyond the common request to implement an MVC pattern, I’d be great if the ASP.NET team could rethink the current model and life cycle. It leaks badly in any complicated scenario. 6 years after its release, I still don’t fully understand it, and I’m ready to bet that I’m in the overwhelming majority. The only time it doesn’t leak is when you don’t need any of the fancy stuff it tries to do. I’m almost at the point where I just don’t use .NET if I’m building a heavy web-based application. Forget learning an O/R mapper, test driven development or understanding domain driven development, the single best thing any ASP.NET developer can learn right now is MonoRail.
I would say that Test Driven development is something that you should learn, though, but aside from that who can disagree? I do understand the page lifecycle, and I understand why they did come up with it. I just think that it has its consequences, and that is unavoidable. You can have the cake and eat it too?
And that’s something I’ve been thinking for sometime. Since Georges Benatti joined Stronghold he has been complaining (nicely) that there should be a way to build reusable pieces. We do have ViewComponents, but it’s not enough. I’m not looking for a breakthrough, but I’m looking for something between Helpers and ViewComponents.
Just so you can understand where I came from. Here at the Stronghold we are always doing complex UI. Not because we think UI must be complex, but because we care about providing a better experience. But we do have to write complex ajax application, mostly on the client side, and we write similar things. We can vary on the logic, on the effects, but overall it’s similar.
There must be a better way.
And to make it even clearer, I like javascript a lot. I think it’s great powerful dynamic language. Sometimes I look at a C# statement and wonder “gosh, I wish I could use a js like closure here”.
The other extreme is WebForms UI components infrastructure. There you are locked in a specific way to create apps. I think MonoRail 2.0 should present an alternative. Non intrusively it should allow you to have full control — like it does now — and in addition allow you to lent some of the control in exchange for more productivity.
I have a dream! 
June 16th, 2007 at 2:16 am
There’s not a whole lot between Helpers and ViewComponents… I expect you actually want something that also provides a wee bit of controller-like logic. Like a sub-controller. This would be a reusable chunk that could be embedded within a delegating controller to service part or all of a request related to components owned by the sub-controller.
Dunno if MonoRail has anything like this already.
June 16th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Can you expand on how you this shoud work and what problems it resolve? I’m leaning to a solution to prevent JS duplication, or some smarter way to generate JS code…
June 18th, 2007 at 8:03 am
I have trouble with anything that auto-generates javascript. It just doesn’t feel right.
June 19th, 2007 at 12:44 am
[…] Complex UI with Monorail, Javascript & Caching Coming to the end of the development cycle of a fairly large & Javascript dependant project, a few issues have cropped up that will probably need resolving before going full production. Im glad that hammett seems to be having similar problems, & it’s not something that has already been solved that I have ignored within MonoRail. […]
June 21st, 2007 at 12:12 am
At one point in time you mentioned you use the Yahoo UI API?
I do like that way they setup ‘PageMethods’ in asp.net for ajax:
http://www.singingeels.com/Articles/Using_Page_Methods_in_ASPNET_AJAX.aspx
I’d like to do something similiar with that ease of programming as in that sample - w/Monorail.
June 21st, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Steve, you already have that with JsProxies. See http://www.castleproject.org/MonoRail/documentation/v1rc2/helpers/ajax/jsproxy.html
June 21st, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Wow!
I didn’t know it did - this is fantastic
Thanks!
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:24 am
After attempting to duplicate that example (if that is what you call it), I get no results of any sort when I click on the button.
I find the documentation to be poor. There isn’t any decent examples, they are just snippets of code here and there, no substance.
Any real samples out there that a beginning can look over?
June 22nd, 2007 at 9:29 am
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Steve. You always say that. We’re not a documentation project, not even a sample code factory. Documentation, unfortunately, is always neglected by OSS project without a big, wealthy company behind it. Sorry about that. If you can jump in and help us, fantastic; if not, there’s nothing much I can say aside from showing my will to get it better. But I have different priorities at the moment.
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:28 am
My post wasn’t to frustrate you, excuse me if so. I understand your situation.
I just want to use this but I don’t have a clue as to how to do it.
ie.
input type=”button” onclick=”javascript:myproxy.DisableUser($(’userid’));”
I set a breakpoint in my controller. Button is clicked, I see it hit that controller ‘DisableUser’ function.
I call ‘RenderText(”Done”)
Nothing displays.
Any ideas?
—
Perhaps a company like JBoss can do for you what they did for NHibernate - would that be what you need ?
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:42 am
There’s a company: Castle Stronghold. Unfortunately it has a long way to become a wealthy one. But we will get there.
About your question. The OK will be the return of your function. So
javascript:alert(myproxy.DisableUser($(’userid’)));
may show you the way
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:12 am
The alert shows the message ‘Done’.
Ok, so now I ask: how do you include javascript within Monorail?
For example, I want to handle the “OnSucceeded” event similiar to that sample above
function OnSucceeded() {
// Dispaly "thank you."
$get("ContactFieldset").innerHTML = "Thank you!";
}
Can I just add script tags to the vm with this function in it ?
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:25 am
(I’ll go post in forum about this)
July 26th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
[…] That being said, I do think that jdn has a point. And that’s why I think MonoRail should offer an alternative. Sometimes I want to craft my UI, sometimes I want to just be fast and get something working real quick. I wrote about some of these ideas earlier. […]
July 30th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
I’d love to see someone do something for monorail like the google client framework, which allows you to make your source in java and compile your client side javascript after it passes all your tests.
August 3rd, 2007 at 2:04 pm
[…] Genius - this summarises an entire field of criticism (e.g. [1][2]). The whole issue with the OnRowDataBound/FindControl() style of programming is that things which […]