General architecture for backend?

Question

We are trying to be forward looking in our architecture choice on some of the new systems we are designing. Pretty much we want to architecture back end system that no matter what interface we decide to use (WinForms, Silverlight, MVC, Webforms, WPF, IOS (IPad/Iphone), ect...) which i believe just screams REST. Our organization generally will only use Microsoft APIs but since i have no idea when WCF-Web-Api will be released and we want to get started soon it looks like we have no other choice.

We want to take baby steps here to increase the chances of buy off. So we don't want to have to set up another server with IIS.

In the foreseeable future we will only be using WinForms & WebForms. What i was thinking we could use Nancy on the local machine but communicate with it in a RESTFul way. That way in the future it should be as simple as setting up a server and redirecting all the clients to that server rather than locally.

I've never used either NancyFX or OpenRasta, but, from what ive heard, it sounded like a good fit.

So the questions are:

Is the way i'm thinking on approaching this a good approach
Does it sound like NancyFX or OpenRasta would be a better fit?
Any reason why we should wait for WCF-Web-API and if so does anyone have an approx release date.

thanks Darrel for the reply. Least that gives me an option if people think WCF Web API would be as good of fit as either Nancy or OpenRasta. — coding4fun, Oct 26 '11 at 18:38
Darrel I don't believe the WCF Web API has announced anything about release dates at this stage. Have you seen something on the public web? — SerialSeb, Oct 26 '11 at 19:48
@serialseb Dan Roth announced it here http://wcf.codeplex.com/discussions/273995 — Darrel Miller, Oct 27 '11 at 00:49

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 26 '11 at 19:48

OpenRasta was built for resource-oriented scenarios. You can achieve the same thing with any other frameworks (with more or less pain). OpenRasta gives you a fully-composited, IoC friendly environment that completely decouples handlers and whatever renders them (which makes it different from MVC frameworks like nancy and MVC).

I'd add that we have a very strong community, a stable codebase and we've been in this for quite a few years, we're building 2.1 and 3.0 and our featureset is still above and beyond what you can get from most other systems. Compare this to most of the frameworks you've highlighted, where none have reached 1.0.

Professional support is also available, if that's a deciding factor for your company.

But to answer your question fully, depending on your scenario and what you want to achieve, you can make anything fits, given enough work. I'd suggest reformulating your question in terms of architecture rather than in terms of frameworks.

General architecture for backend?

1 Answers1