Christopher Bennage

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The Castle Project/MonoRail

If you do any Web development whatsoever then you have most likely heard of Ruby on Rails. Ruby is a dynamic programming language and Rails is a framework for Web development. It's analogous to saying C# on ASP.NET. Well, the Rails framework is impressive to me in its own right. Even after just hearing some friends discuss it, my mind immediately began to try to apply the ideas to .NET. Luckily, I stumbled across the Castle Project. Castle is a rich, open source project that offers a great many things. One of those things is MonoRail, a port of Rails to the .NET framework.

Rails and MonoRail are both built around the Model-View-Controller pattern. (As opposed to the Page Controller pattern that ASP.NET claims to built around.)

My initial forays into MonoRail have been promising and I really hope the project's community continues to grow.

I will warn you, if you begin to play with MonoRail you will begin to hate the Page lifecycle in ASP.NET.

Published Sep 20 2006, 09:33 PM by Christopher Bennage

Filed under: ASP.NET, Design Patterns, RoR, Castle Project

Comments

Ayende Rahien said:

I would contend that if you work (instead of play) with ASP.Net, you'll learn to hate the Page lifecycle

# September 22, 2006 6:29 AM

Joe Niland said:

I'd be interested to see how it scales performance-wise. Since they are obviously either "wrapping" the ASP.NET page lifecycle or have implemented their own custom Page handler, the question is whether this will still remain flexible and performant for large sites.

# September 27, 2006 10:42 AM

Christopher Bennage said:

It's implemented with a custom Page handler. I think (and I'm totally guessing) that it's performance bottlenecks would be it's default templating engine (NVelocity) and data-access (NHibernate). However, you don't have to use the defaults. In my basic tests, I was able to wire in my own O\RM in about 15 minutes.

I'm hoping that I can do some real tests with it in a month or two. If so, I will defintely post the results.

# September 27, 2006 5:13 PM

About Christopher Bennage

Christopher is a software developer and consultant at Blue Spire Consulting, a company he co-founded with Rob Eisenberg in 2006. He is a Christian, a marginal musician, and an armchair philosopher. His interests include programming, liberal education, science, truth, beauty, and a number of deceased British authors (C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and most recently Owen Barfield.) He lives in Tallahassee, FL with his wife and three children and still prefers to play as the Night Elves in WarCraft 3.