Web Frameworks Evaluation

One of the reasons progress on my web frameworks' evaluation has been so slow of late is that my last check-in broke my CCNET automated build, and, as the good programmer I am, I felt that this needed fixing before I made any more progress.

I'd written some unit tests for the PostController (good) that were accessing the database directly (bad), and for whatever reason the build machine couldn't successfully connect to the database. A classic case of "works on my machine!", and, as is usually the case with such things, a good example of poor design.

It's been a little while since I made any progress on this little project of mine, due to the downtime I suffered throughout December. I couldn't get access to my virtual machine server, so I wasn't able to restart the VM hosting my blog and my Subversion repositories; everything went down together.

As such, it's probably time for an update on where I've got to so far.

ASP.NET MVC is still only a beta, although it has only recently gained this status from the previous "Tech Preview" releases. The rumour is that it will RTM as part of .NET 4.0.

Following on from a recent comment discussion, I'm taking on a small project to evaluate a number of the major web development frameworks currently available. I've settled on a very simple blogging system as my sample project, with a common MySQL backend. In this first post of the series, I set out the terms of reference for the evaluation, including the (very basic) requirements for the sample application.