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.
Show Links:
- NancyFX git repo, NuGet package, Google Group, @NancyFx
- Andreas Håkansson (@TheCodeJunkie)
- Steven Robbin (@Grumpydev)
- Nancy, Sinatra and the Explosion of .NET Micro Web Frameworks with Andreas Håkansson
Download / Listen:
Herding Code 123: Andreas Håkansson and Steven Robbins on NancyFx
[audio://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0123-Andreas-Hakansson-and-Steven-Robbins-on-NancyFx.mp3]Note: Thanks to @rossfuhrman for typing our show notes this week!