PHP   vs    .Net

Being a web programmer for the last 10 years, I've seen a few different paradigms come and go in the web world. Looking around today, I can't help but think that the writings are on the wall for the ASP.Net "webforms" web application model. When it debuted, it was revolutionary to have a fully typed, compiled OO framework that was virtually portable to mobile and desktop. However, since then, ASP.Net has not done much to improve the initial offerings. Yes, the 2.0 framework was much more robust, and VS 2005 had lots of IDE help for webmasters, but fundamentally, the same problems that held developers of 1.0 sites back are holding developers of 3.0 sites back - namely, the ASP.Net page lifecycle.

Viewstate and lifecycle events are still very confusing for new ASP.Net programmers. There is no easy way for them to immediately "get it" - they have to spend the time in the trenches, watching their data disappear on post back, or double-bind, and flail around with building and rendering their own web controls. They have to see the DataGrid spew its html diarrhea and spend hours customizing it. They have to have that client ask them "what the hell is all this javascript, and why are the pages so big?" and figure out just what the heck all that gibberish on their pages are.

Moving up the experience chain, Viewstate and lifecycle events represent a significant amount of design and front-end time on a web application even for those that have been doing it for a while. You have to balance your state management with your html optimization, caching, and application maintainability. Often you have to build your own state-tracking structures or extend existing ones. You have to carefully consider whether to roll your own custom controls or buy third party interfaces and rely on their javascript and state programming (or maybe their support team!) And for very simple "read-only" web sites, viewstate just gets in the way.

So in summary, Viewstate and lifecycle are still be a pain in the butt, and still represent hurdles for new programmers. Years ago, it was worth the annoyances and problems, because you could write strongly typed, object oriented portable code without getting lost in folders and folders of scripted sites. So why might it be dying? Well…

The first item on the agenda is Silverlight. ASP.Net represented significant advantages for writing portable code that was closer to classic desktop programming, as it abstracted out much of the xhtml. But now I've seen web application developers swoon over Silverlight. If their reaction is any indication, and the amount of momentum that Microsoft is putting into WPF, many shops are going to give up programming their internal or non-public projects in ASP.Net and move to Silverlight instead. I'm personally still skeptical about Silverlight's market penetration, as there are many gaps it doesn't fill for content publishers. But it's not a minor consideration.

Second is the new ASP.Net MVC framework. MVC is an old model that's rapidly gaining traction in the web world, and with the introduction of the ASP.Net MVC framework, it is hard to see any clear advantage to the older webforms model. From Scott Guthrie's Introductory MVC post a couple months ago:

To help enforce testability, the MVC framework today does not support postback events directly to server controls within your Views. Instead, ASP.NET MVC applications generate hyperlink and AJAX callbacks to Controller actions - and then use Views (and any server controls within them) solely to render output. This helps ensure that your View logic stays minimal and solely focused on rendering, and that you can easily unit test your Controller classes and verify all Application and Data Logic behavior independent of your Views.

And finally, we come to REST, another model that is gaining traction. True REST and webforms are mutually exclusive since REST involves heavy reliance on mapping resource locators to known states of an application. This model has lots of advantages for web services and data-based applications, especially in the realms of testing, while ASP.Net Webform applications are often built around one URL for many states, using Viewstate and Session as your state map, which are of course lost between sessions and server restarts.

So long story short… I think we're seeing the beginning of a new paradigm. In 5 years, will anyone still be developing with true ASP.Net Webforms? It will be interesting to see!