On this episode, the guys talk to Andreas and Steven about Nancy, a lightweight, low-ceremony, framework for building HTTP based services on .Net and Mono.
Scott Koon asks why Nancy was developed and what are the problems going up against ASP.NET.Andreas explains Nancy is a lighter approach and doesn't get in the way.Andreas explains a basic Hello World - 5 lines of code, and Steven points out a Nancy app fits in a single Tweet.Nancy has No System.Web dependencies - just depends on the Client profile, and works great on Mono.Jon asks about support for OWIN, a Rack equivalent for .NET. Combining Nancy and OWIN allows you to have an end-to-end OSS solution.Jon asks about support for view engines, and Andreas says that Nancy supports most major view engines including Razor and Spark. There are quite a few Nuget plugins.Andreas points out that you can do most things in Nancy that you can do in ASP.NET MVC.Jon asks if you can add Nancy to an existing ASP.NET MVC app.The group discusses the value of having many competing web frameworks.Steven explains Nancy isn't about crushing the competition, just providing a different approach that some people might prefer.Jon asks Andreas about his post about the value of OSS being the vision not the code.Jon asks about web application security for Nancy - since it's a lightweight framework, am I on my own when it comes to security? Steven explains the security features in Nancy, and how they work without requiring a dependency on System.Web.Jon asks how many users of Nancy there are.Kevin asks what the most challenging part of developing Nancy has been. - Steven: HTTP implementation and the syntax simplicity. Andreas: fighting C# syntax limitations.Kevin asks whether Nancy is trying to be ASP.NET MVC.The group discusses extensibility and custom configurations.Andreas explains Nancy will be adding static and trace diagnostics in the future.Twitter question from @bitbonk: "Relate or compare NancyFx with WCF Web API."Twitter question from @codereflection: "can we get around having to mock httpcontext w/ Nancy? Do we even need to?"Via Twitter, @kppullin asks about how the Nancy team decides how to add features.Jon asks about the best places for interested users to get information, and there's a discussion of documentation, Google Groups, Twitter, and screencasts.Jon asks about a NuGet packages that would have some samples. Andreas explains why the samples are included along with the source code on Github instead.Kevin asks whether they do performance testing, and how Nancy's performance stacks up.Show Links:
NancyFX git repo, NuGet package, Google Group, @NancyFxAndreas Håkansson (@TheCodeJunkie)Steven Robbin (@Grumpydev)Nancy, Sinatra and the Explosion of .NET Micro Web Frameworks with Andreas HåkanssonDownload / Listen:
Herding Code 123: Andreas Håkansson and Steven Robbins on NancyFx
Note: Thanks to @rossfuhrman for typing our show notes this week!
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