I'm starting to see more ASP.NET MVC samples and questions come out and I'm realizing that a large portion of the ASP.NET crowd doesn't even realize that a huge reason for the MVC movement is because of the Ruby on Rails framework. A lot of new .NET MVC developers are struggling with architectural questions that have already been debated and answered in the Rails community, which makes Rails a great resource for when you're first starting out or you're curious how to handle certain situations, like nested resources or how to structure your controllers.
Speaking of controllers one great thing from Rails that I hope more MVC developers embrace is REST. Instead of repeating everything just watch David Heinemeier Hansson's keynote speech from RailsConf back in 2006. Sure, it's almost two years but for ASP.NET developers it may as well be yesterday. I'd suggest starting from the second part since the first segment is just normal conference ra-ra-ra.
Check it out here (don't forget to download the slides that he refers to here).
Note
He talks about using a semi-colon in the URL to denote an aspect/action of a controller, like this:
/people/1;edit
Well, you can ignore that and just assume he *really* meant to say:
/people/1/edit
They dropped that semi-colon silliness in Rails 2.0 and it feels much cleaner.
2 comments:
I somewhat disagree that "a lot of ASP.NET crowd" doesn't realize that MVC is mostly popular because of rails. I'd like to give our community a little more credit than that.
What I absolutely agree with, though is that we can learn from rails (it's successes, mistakes) because they are a mature framework with a huge user base. And they've been successful in the face of extreme skepticism.
One thing I'd like to add is this: While we can learn from rails, we shouldn't be only looking at rails, because that limits our ability to innovate and grow.
Also, wasn't REST popular before that keynote? I remember reading about it long before that, and I even saw an ASP.NET implementation before rails adopted it as a convention.
@Scheirman
You're right, it's not fair to say "a lot of the ASP.NET crowd", I really have no way to qualify that. I should have said, "Some people just coming to MVC in ASP.NET don't realize some of their questions have been asked in other frameworks that already support MVC." Even that isn't really accurate, it's just what I've observed from reading blogs and the ASP.NET MVC forums. As always, millage varies based on the circles you run in.
You're also spot on about REST, the term has been coined since 2000 and it really has nothing to do with Rails except that Rails exposed the concept to a wider audience. In fact I'm usually the one pointing that fact out to Rails advocates :)
I completely agree that we should look beyond just Rails, into frameworks like Django and CakePHP and a ton of the others that are supporting MVC. Also, MVC itself is just a basic software design pattern that people should brush up on independently from how any one framework implements it.
Great points you brought up.
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