CSLA vs netTiers

skaue posted on Friday, April 20, 2007

I may not even know what I am asking for here, but I'll give it a shot.

I am in the beginning of making a web application in .Net (2.0) and I have been recommended the CSLA Framework. I see some developers wonder if CSLA is applicable for web applications and apparantly it does.
I've also considered .netTiers for CodeGeneration and was wondering if anyone had comments on these templates compared to CSLA. Are they even comparable for splitting your app in multiple tiers?

RockfordLhotka replied on Friday, April 20, 2007

nettiers and csla take radically different approaches to solving issues.

nettiers relies almost entirely (maybe entirely) on code generation and extensive templates. In other words, it generates everything.

CSLA .NET is a framework that tries to fill in the gaps not filled in by .NET itself in the case that you want to design and build an object-oriented business layer for your application. People have created code-generation templates to help implement this style of business object for the business layer.

You'll have to decide which approach fits your needs the best, or perhaps others on the forum will chime in with more detailed comparisons. For my part, I'm obviously biased toward the framework solution taken by CSLA .NET

skaue replied on Wednesday, April 25, 2007

I didn't know that. It sounds almost like you can use both in conjunction. CSLA can replace some of the things nettiers create during codegeneration.

Btw, I and a collegue of mine are coming from Norway to hear you talk on VSLive this may. Looking forward to hear you preach ;-)

RockfordLhotka replied on Wednesday, April 25, 2007

I'm a bit skeptical about using them together. NetTiers is quite large and comprehensive, and I think you'd have a rough time trying to alter their templates to use CSLA base classes. My guess is that you'd end up rewriting pretty much their entire template set by the time you use the base classes and remove all the code that would no longer be needed in the templates.

See you in Orlando!

skaue replied on Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Yeah, maybe. I wouldn't know honestly. :P

At the moment I need to first figure out how to authenticate users and authorize access to the businessobjects.... :-/