A link to Doug Copestake’s article “ASP.Net MVP: A Step Backwards?” was forwarded to me, and it made some short rounds on twitter. I read it and had a comment underway and thought, “This is WAY to big for a comment, let’s blog it!” So here we are.
Off the top, I’d like to give a tip of the hat to Doug for stepping outside his day to day and taking a look at ASP.Net MVC. It’s very easy to hide behind FUD and just blow off something different. Additionally, his initial findings are pretty much on par with most other folks happy with WebForms who take their first look at MVC.
The MVC framework definitely provides simplicity and separation of concerns to web development. It allows you to only write the code you need to write to get the job done, and it allows you to work with the framework. Views become very small and very specialized, controller actions mature to be very thin, and it’s all easily testable.
This has made my work with the MVC framework extremely successful. Since everything is easily testable, as we refactor the code to clean it up or add new functionality, it all flows very easily.
Control reuse comes from veteran WebForms developers quite often. But if we again point at simplicity, how many of those drag and drop controls were written to cover more functionality than you need? You drag a grid control out and use 15% of it’s power because its made for everyone. Yes, you can write your own application controls to do exactly what you want, but you can do that in MVC, too.
Another point to control reuse is the leveraging of more javascript frameworks to do many of the things that the WebForm control suites do. In jQuery UI alone, you’ll get tabs, accordion panels, sliders and other UI elements, all with out that “server side” part that is so prevalent in WebForms. The win there is in more than just lighter weight controls, you gain a much better user experience. (And who doesn’t like happy users?)
The spaghetti code point Doug makes is quite valid, though I think that’s not a factor of one framework or the other as much as it is the person writing the code. The Glen Vanderburg quote, “A bad developer will move heaven and Earth to do the wrong thing,” applies to all languages and frameworks. The person with the keyboard under their fingers is responsible for keeping their code clean, not the framework developers, but I digress.
Spaghetti code in the views is a big sign that you’ve done something wrong. Even before moving to Spark, if you see lots of server instructions in your views, it’s time to stop and think, “What can I do differently here?” Same can be said of your controllers. If you’re used to writing a 50 line page load method in WebForms, turning similar code into 50 line controller actions is a step in the wrong direction. I guess the main point here is instead of relying/hoping for the framework to do the work for you, the onus is now squarely on the shoulders of the developer to keep his or her code concise.
Doug’s last point is very true, though: if you have a lot invested in WebForms in your current situation, there’s no real reason to switch away from it. Switching for the sake of switching to anything usually isn’t a good move.
That said, you can easily run WebForms and MVC in the same web application. If you have a little something to add to the project that can stand on its own, I’d say a look at MVC is in order.
This definitely would have been too long of a comment… :)
2 comments:
I was glad to see that people weren't blasting that post in his comments and that most people were talking about the benefits of MVC and just encouraging to look into it more. I'm curious to see if we see another post from him a year from now praising MVC.
I used Webforms since the first day .NET beta came out. At first it was good. Then it became a mess itself. Bulky, hard to do javascript. Then Web 2.0 came. Ajax got big, frameworks started to show up - 'ajax panels' and the such. Large viewstate, etc...
Then mvc comes in, a standard. Well proven. Used by just about every web framework in every language today -from RoR to Grails, to Spring MVC, Django, Zend PHP, etc.. you name it.
These webform guys are mostly just clinging to heavy and expensive webform postback controls.
I agree with you post and the benefits. By the way, Telerik has free mvc controls. Html helpers are easy to create - and in the end, all those fancy and expensive webform controls just emit html.
Today, webforms represents a large legacy existence. Better tools and frameworks have come into focus.
For the record, I have a built from scratch a mvc application over a year now, and it's a pleasure to work with, very flexible, easy to test, easy to use proven javascript languages like jQuery, etc...
I've seen some pretty bad webform code. And even the good code is mvp focused, where the page calls the controller...
Good experiment, many will cling to it because it's a comfort level job security thing, but overall, I would give Webforms a C grade in what it's done for web development.
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