Who uses different data portal configurations in production?

rsbaker0 posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009

We're about to complete a two year migration from our legacy product to CSLA and hope to release the upgrade into production in the next two months.

From the beginning, we designed for the 3-tier configuration and have done testing for both the local data portal as well as Web Service, WCF, and .NET remoting portals.

So, we plan to go out the door with the customer being able to choose between these 4 different configurations depending on their requirements.

Is anyone else doing this or are you primarily targeting a specific data portal configuration? Any caveats?

RockfordLhotka replied on Monday, November 16, 2009

Why would you enable your customers to make this choice? Is there some advantage you or they gain?

CSLA is flexible to shield against technology changes - Remoting and asmx are legacy, WCF is current - and I added the whole provider model as a way to gracefully support movement from the older technologies to WCF, and perhaps someday from WCF to yet another thing.

rsbaker0 replied on Monday, November 16, 2009

Well, our customer base ranges from single standalone installations with a very small database (a few hundred items) and single user, to large cross-site deployments with hundreds (or more) of users and hundreds of thousands of items. Then we have distributed customers who need access via firewalls.

For the small customer, the local data portal is the easiest to deploy.

As you suggest, we're recommending WCF as the suggested 3-tier configuration.

I also have customers with unique IT organizations who sometime dictate policy. One of our customers can't make any configuration changes to their IIS machines. The standard IIS deployment in their network supports the asmx portal, but not the WCF portal. So, it seemed wise to maintain the flexibility provided by the framework.

RockfordLhotka replied on Monday, November 16, 2009

Certainly it should be fine to use any of the data provider channels - and
your reasons seem sound.

You should probably know that in 4.0 my plan is to move the Remoting, asmx
and Enterprise Services channels out of the core framework and to put them
into a separate project (or projects). They'll still work as they do today,
they'll just be in separate assemblies.

rsbaker0 replied on Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Thanks.

I'm really surprised there aren't more (at least based on the response) that don't use at least 2 portals -- the local portal + at least one of the 3 tier portals.

You espoused at some length in your 2005 book that scaling to 3 tiers actually reduced performance for the individual user, so I'd think that use of the local portal would be common as it would provide the best performance in smaller simple network situations. Having the ability to easily scale upwards should the situation demand it is a major plus and one of the main reasons we initially chose CSLA.