Castle

What's holding Castle back?

hamilton verissimo — Sat, 13 May 2006 01:27:00 GMT

I've been asked this lots of times: why Castle hasn't reached 1.0? To be honest, nothing much, but as I'm a perfeccionist I decided to make some things better (and my my top priorities) before going 1.0.

DynamicProxy rewrite

DynamicProxy plays an important role on castle and several other projects outside castle umbrella. However it has some limitations to overcome. I'm working on it on my spare time and hopefully will have something to be tested this month.

After completing it I'll have to work on MicroKernel/Windsor/Aspect# to bring them up to date with the new DynamicProxy API.

Rewrite Scaffolding support

I'm considering rewriting this one using the new StringTemplate View Engine, as it supports recursion, something that is missing on NVelocity. It also should reuse most of what has been developed on the new FormHelper and the new DataBinder implementation.

If you want some cool Scaffolding now, I suggest that you take a look at what Marc-Andre Cournoyer has created.

Complete VS.Net Wizard refactoring

This was requested by the company I work for. They want extensibility on the VS.Net wizards so their extensions can be plugged. It's 99% completed, though. I just need to test it more and create a version for VS.Net 2005

Add Cache support to MonoRail

Still unsure about this one. It's definitely required, and I'd love if we could came up with a design that sits between MR core and the selected view engine. Yeah, View Engine agnostic. But a bad implementation is so easy to be accomplished. I wish I had the need on my current project so I could extract an implementation from it, instead of creating one by trying to antecipate the requirements...

Rethink EventWiring facility

This is an important piece. Events can really improve the level of decoupling you have in a system. The current implementation of the event wiring facility has some assumption that have been wrong on the mailing list. The problem is that we need to come up with different behaviors, so I think the best thing now is to stick with a default behavior and allow the developer to inform what he/she wants through the external configuration... can be a quagmire...

So, when all this issues are solved -- and the issues on jira -- we'll be 1.0 ! :-)

MonoRail on ssdotnet

hamilton verissimo — Fri, 05 May 2006 02:43:00 GMT

If you're around Olympia, WA, you should stop by and attend to Chris Bilson's presentation on MonoRail. Quoting ssdotnet web site:

"Developing web based applications is full of challenges and pitfalls: session state, view state, post backs, control trees, and page lifecycles. How many times have you heard the dreaded, “I clicked refresh and it debited my account twice!?!?” A number of people have come up with clever ways to simplify web apps. Some don’t actually make it more complicated. Let’s talk about one framework, Monorail, some of the things it brings to the table, including it’s ultra-simple data-mapping API, ActiveRecord, and finish off with a discussion about database unit testing."

Being a little nitpick here I do need to state that MonoRail and ActiveRecord are two completely separated projects. MonoRail offers some level of integration with ActiveRecord and the Windsor container. But, yada yada yada, that's irrelevant. It's cool that people are talking about it. :-)

Active Record article - Part II

hamilton verissimo — Mon, 01 May 2006 03:01:00 GMT

I started the second part of the series on the plane while getting back to my country. I tried to dive into the initialization process. Hope you enjoy it!

New article on Castle ActiveRecord

hamilton verissimo — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 03:03:00 GMT

I started a series of articles with an ambitious goal: demystify ActiveRecord. This will hopefully create some AR hackers in time. So get some coffee and read All you wanted to know about Castle ActiveRecord - Part I

MonoRail job?

hamilton verissimo — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:51:00 GMT

Funny job ad:

Senior Software Engineer (C#)

We’re looking for the you! Must be able to be bend software with your mind, create hugely scalable web sites, program like the wind, and not get dizzy while confronted with two huge 20” monitors. We use a lot of C#, .NET, MonoRail, Indigo. We like to drink beer and eat CheezIts.

Btw, if you want to apply for this job, see pluck web site

And another thing: these guys developed the awesome Shadows

Interesting comment on MonoRail usage of NVelocity

hamilton verissimo — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 19:40:00 GMT

Comment posted on Introducting Castle Part II:

I have to agree with you on this, Hamilton - even when I first started looking at Rails (a few months ago) and went, "oh boy, Castle's like Rails but on .NET... but what's this NVelocity thing?"... I was never worried about it being hard to use. If anything, it seems too simple, too procedural after working with server controls for years and years.

For me, it's taken a couple of months working with ERB in Rails to really appreciate its simplicity; I'd have to suspect that 98% of the time, something like NVelocity is more than sufficient for rendering needs. Looking back on it, I see just how awful a lot of my old server/user controls were in terms of separation of concerns, keeping to MVC, etc. Approaching an interface problem with nothing but encapsulation, encapsulation, encapsulation in my toolkit tends to inspire behemoth controls that only work where they were designed, or else I would spend half my time trying to predict how to make a 'reusable' control instead of getting the job done. I still have DataGrid derivatives which were designed for a particular type of data, automatically varying parameters on stored procedure calls to accomplish sorting, paging, editing, and so forth. Not that it's an inherently bad thing (when everything works right) - it can be really convenient - but wow; that's a model, view and controller all built into one. When encapsulating objects to make my code neater just encapsulates it into many-long-methods-per-class spaghetti controls, something's not working right.

Don't get me wrong - I've read comments from a lot of other people who don't fall prey to 'reuseaholism' like I do, so I'm not trying to generalize this to everyone. But when I remember my first days in .NET, when I just used Repeaters instead of DataGrids (for full customization) and Repeaters instead of DataLists (e.g. navigation menus)... I have to wonder if maybe it's all I need for 98% of the pages I create? Anyway, all that I know for sure is that NVelocity is a heck of a lot easier than crafting server controls for every rendering need. - Though I must admit you could argue they're too easy, they're too underpowered, to the point of inefficiency and procedural/spaghetti code when you're nesting loops within loops with conditions and conditions up the wazoo. But, hey, then you just use a WebForms page for those nasty bits, right?

Getting on the MonoRail - Philippine .NET Users Group Presentation

hamilton verissimo — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 03:05:00 GMT

Andre has just directed me to the files of his presentation on MonoRail. Great stuff!

One thing, though: scaffolding works great. I don't know which problem he might have had. I thought the documentation on the scaffolding has cleared all questions :-(

Enters Carbonmade

hamilton verissimo — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 21:46:00 GMT

Jason Nelson has announced on Castle-devel list that his project, built using MonoRail, is going online: http://www.carbonmade.com/

It seems very nice and the usage of routing made some nice urls. Congrats to Jason and his team!