Herding Code 123: Andreas Håkansson and Steven Robbins on NancyFx

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.

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Herding Code 123: Andreas Håkansson and Steven Robbins on NancyFx

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Note: Thanks to @rossfuhrman for typing our show notes this week!

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