DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself! is one of the main ideas of a good developer while developing a software. We’re trying to implement it from simple methods to classes and modules. What about developing a new web based application? We, software developers, have similar needs when developing enterprise web applications.
Enterprise web applications need login pages, user/role management infrastructure, user/application setting management, localization and so on. Also, a high quality and large scale software implements best practices such as Layered Architecture, Domain Driven Design (DDD), Dependency Injection (DI). Also, we use tools for Object-Releational Mapping (ORM), Database Migrations, Logging… etc. When it comes to the User Interface (UI), it’s not much different.
Starting a new enterprise web application is a hard work. Since all applications need some common tasks, we’re repeating ourselves. Many companies are developing their own Application Frameworks or Libraries for such common tasks to do not re-develop same things. Others are copying some parts of existing applications and preparing a start point for their new application. First approach is pretty good if your company is big enough and has time to develop such a framework.
As a software architect, I also developed such a framework im my company. But, there is some point it feels me bad: Many company repeats same tasks. What if we can share more, repeat less? What if DRY principle is implemented universally instead of per project or per company? It sounds utopian, but I think there may be a starting point for that!
What is ASP.NET Boilerplate?
http://www.aspnetboilerplate.com/
ASP.NET Boilerplate [1] is a starting point for new modern web applications using best practices and most popular tools. It’s aimed to be a solid model, a general-purpose application framework and a project template. What it does?
- Server side
- Based on latest ASP.NET MVC and Web API.
- Implements Domain Driven Design (Entities, Repositories, Domain Services, Application Services, DTOs, Unif Of Work… and so on)
- Implements Layered Architecture (Domain, Application, Presentation and Infrastructure Layers).
- Provides an infrastructure to develop reusable and composable modules for large projects.
- Uses most popular frameworks/libraries as (probably) you’re already using.
- Provides an infrastructure and make it easy to use Dependency Injection (uses Castle Windsor as DI container).
- Provides a strict model and base classes to use Object-Releational Mapping easily (uses NHibernate, can work with many DBMS).
- Implements database migrations (uses FluentMigrator).
- Includes a simple and flexible localization system.
- Includes an EventBus for server-side global domain events.
- Manages exception handling and validation.
- Creates dynamic Web API layer for application services.
- Provides base and helper classes to implement some common tasks.
- Uses convention over configuration principle.
- Client side
- Provides two project templates. One for Single-Page Applications using Durandaljs, other one is a Multi-Page Application. Both templates uses Twitter Bootstrap.
- Most used libraries are included by default: Knockout.js, Require.js, jQuery and some useful plug-ins.
- Creates dynamic javascript proxies to call application services (using dynamic Web API layer) easily.
- Includes unique APIs for some sommon tasks: showing alerts & notifications, blocking UI, making AJAX requests.
Beside these common infrastructure, the “Core Module” is being developed. It will provide a role and permission based authorization system (implementing ASP.NET Identity Framework), a setting systems and so on.
What ASP.NET Boilerplate is not?
ASP.NET Boilerplate provides an application development model with best practices. It has base classes, interfaces and tools that makes easy to build maintainable large-scale applications. But..
- It’s not one of RAD (Rapid Application Development) tools those provide infrastructure for building applications without coding. Instead, it provides an infrastructure to code in best practices.
- It’s not a code generation tool. While it has several features those build dynamic code in run-time, it does not generate codes.
- It’s not a all-in-one framework. Instead, it uses well known tools/libraries for specific tasks (like NHibernate for O/RM, Log4Net for logging, Castle Windsor as DI container).
Getting started
In this article, I’ll show how to deleveop a Single-Page and Responsive Web Application using ASP.NET Boilerplate (I’ll call it as ABP from now). This sample application is named as “Simple Task System” and it consists of two pages: one for list of tasks, other one is to add new tasks. A Task can be related to a person, can be completed. The application is localized in two languages. Screenshot of Task List in the application is shown below:
Creating empty web application from template
ABP provides two templates to start a new project (Even if you can manually create your project and get ABP packages from nuget, template way is much more easy). Go to www.aspnetboilerplate.com/Templates to create your application from one of twotemplates (one for SPA (Single-Page Application), one for MPA (classic, Multi-Page Application) projects):
I named my project as SimpleTaskSystem and created a SPA project. It downloaded project as a zip file. When I open the zip file, I see a solution is ready that contains assemblies (projects) for each layer of Domain Driven Design:
Created project’s runtime is .NET Framework 4.5.1, I advice to open with Visual Studio 2013. The only prerequise to be able to run the project is to create a database. SPA template assumes that you’re using SQL Server 2008 or later. But you can change it easily to another DBMS.
See the connection string in web.config file of the web project:
<add name="MainDb" connectionString="Server=localhost; Database=SimpleTaskSystemDb; Trusted_Connection=True;" />
You can change connection string here. I don’t change the database name, so I’m creating an empty database, named SimpleTaskSystemDb, in SQL Server:
That’s it, your project is ready to run! Open it in VS2013 and press F5:
Template consists of two pages: One for Home page, other is About page. It’s localized in English and Turkish. And it’s Single-Page Application! Try to navigate between pages, you’ll see that only the contents are changing, navigation menu is fixed, all scripts and styles are loaded only once. And it’s responsive. Try to change size of the browser.
Now, I’ll show how to change the application to a Simple Task System application layer by layer in the coming part 2
SharePoint Samurai 