We are currently investigating various technologies and frameworks for our next generation of software in our company. The last month or so we have successfully used csla.net (v2.1), smartclient software factory (& cab) + UI controls from Infragistics to create a sample app in our company. I'm impressed by the ease of use and incredibly powerful concepts behind csla (distributed mobile objects which supports databinding and local+remote dataportals). We are pleased with the productivity gains using these technologies together and after a rather steep learning curve for SCSF+CAB we are now almost ready to give these technologies a green light and go for CSLA.
However, we are also considering looking into the Service Factory. I haven't seen any discussions about this on the forum and how it relates to *CSLA. As far as I understand, the Service factory is either a "competing" or at least overlapping tool/technology compared to CSLA. What are the main difference between CSLA and Service factory and what are strong and weak points for each?
In the short term I'm convinced that CSLA is the right solution for our company. It solves, in a very elegant way, most of our requirements for our datacentric application. However, we have the constant buzz of SOA in the background. In a competetive market we must also look at how competing products is launched the market. It won't matter if we have the "the most elegant and user friendly application with instant validation and best perfomance" if the customer (or consultant hired to help decide what product to buy) is simply looking for terms like "SOA, scalable, open, xml-based, loosely coupled..." in our demos.
I know this is off-topic, but I feel that it should be room for a healthy debate about CSLA vs. WebService (Service Factory). Conflicting? Overlapping? Or I have I not got the essential questions right here ?
Any thoughts ?
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