Considering CSLA...Would you recommend it?

jcc27 posted on Monday, November 06, 2006

Our company is in the beginning stages of re-engineering our enterprise VB6 product to the OOP .NET world and we are considering using CSLA to assist us. Our commercial application is quite large and complex, incorporating hundreds of tables. I was wondering if anyone on this forum has used CSLA for this type of undertaking and if so how your experiences have been and if you would recommend it. Also, would it be possible to get specific names of corporations that have used CSLA so we could contact them for a reference?

Thanks in advance for your assistance,

Jonathan

 

david.wendelken replied on Monday, November 06, 2006

If you are doing an application of that size, and want it to be reasonably reliable and affordable, you need a framework and its associated "best & common practices" in order to succeed.

I've built quite a few large systems before and just finished my first project with CSLA. 

Had plenty of problems figuring out the ASP 2.0 controls (I'm new to ASP, C# and fairly new to Web programming in general).  Had almost no trouble figuring out how to make CSLA work.

I've seen nothing in CSLA that makes me nervous about using it for the next part of my project, which will require thousands of objects.

ajj3085 replied on Tuesday, November 07, 2006

I think most here would answer a resounding yes.  I would recommend at least skimming through the book, to see what topics are covered, and to get an idea of the philosophy behind the framework.

For example, number of tables wouldn't be a factor, because you build objects to satisfy use cases, you're not building objects on top of an ORM framework.

So get a copy of the book and at least skim though it; even if you don't use Csla, there are a lot of good concepts in there that will likely apply to you.

HTH
Andy

jcc27 replied on Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Thanks David and Andy for your responses. Our company recently bought several copies of the book and we are in the process of reviewing it. 

Again, I greatly appreciate you guys taking the time to respond to my post.

Cheers!

Jonathan

 

xal replied on Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Jonathan,
This is like going to a soccer team's forum and asking if their team is any good... you'll rarely find an oppinion that says "no", so perhaps you should ask _that_ question in a tech forum that is less biased.

Other than that, let me join the bunch and say that csla has made a success of many projects I've worked on. It is very mature, widely used, and has an awesome community with many people willing to help you out (including Rocky himself).

It has a brilliant rule handling mechanism and supports several "connection modes" that you can extend if you ever need to.

But as any technology, you don't only have to learn how it's used, but you have to learn how to use it right. I've seen a lot of people dissapointed at csla only to see that their approach was wrong.

The good thing is that since you're coming from a vb6 background, you're not tainted by the dataset wich usually leads you to think in a very data centric way. Csla on the other hand is all about behavioural and object oriented programming. I'm not saying datasets are bad, don't get me wrong, but they can be seriously missused sometimes.

Anyway, I hope you find your path. Welcome to the community!!

Andrés