It’s less than two weeks since I began my experiment using the Spark View Engine with C# WebServer. Even though it’s put a kink in our development schedule, I’m confident it was the right move. It’ll save us a lot of time in the long run.
After posting messages to the Spark project and C# WebServer project forums, I decided there was enough interest to make sharing my integration code worthwhile.
You can find it at: http://code.google.com/p/sparkserver/
If you’d like to participate in the project, please let me know. Comments, suggestions, and especially fixes are always welcome!
Microsoft provides lots of different ways to encode HTML and URIs, but their newest library, called AntiXSS, is the best of the bunch.
I mentioned that we were looking for an IIS alternative that we could embed within our Infovark client installation.
After weighing the options, we decided to move forward with the C# WebServer. Instead of using one of the two rendering engines currently included in the WebServer project, though, we’ve decided to use the Spark View Engine instead.
Spark has a clean template syntax that makes HTML tags stand out. It also has the most sensible design for creating master layout templates I’ve seen. I think it’ll be fairly straightforward to convert our existing XSLT templates into Spark syntax.
Integrating Spark with the C# WebServer will be a challenge, though. Much of the existing Spark documentation assumes you’ll be using the Spark.Web.Mvc classes. Since the C# WebServer project has its own lightweight MVC framework, we’ll need to build our own integration classes.
The C# WebServer project has a way to add alternative template engines, but the hooks provided don’t look like a clean fit with Spark. I think it’ll take some tinkering to get the two to work together seamlessly.
I’ll post some messages to the discussion boards at both open source projects. If you’re interested in helping out with the effort — or would be interested in the results of the project — leave a message in the comments or send an email to info@infovark.com.
One year ago it became clear that Infovark had outgrown the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
We’d decided to use WCF because we wanted Infovark to provide web services, and we liked the fact that we could deploy WCF to client machines. Since WCF is built directly on top of HttpListener, a core part of the Microsoft .NET Framework, we wouldn’t need to use System.Net or Microsoft IIS.
But we’ve struggled with WCF for a variety of reasons. First, we wanted to use a REST model for our web services, and WCF’s support for REST architectures lags behind its SOAP support.
Second, there’s no easy way to return HTML from WCF. We tried transforming our XML with XSLT and returning the XHTML results as a Stream. This works, but the programming experience is frustrating.
Last, because of the previous two reasons, we were left with a website that was way too rigid and programmer-like. It didn’t feel like an organic website. The tool we’d picked was forcing us to compromise on our website design goals.
Infovark’s primary mission is to help human beings, not other computers. That means that the look and feel of the web interface should be our number one priority. Awesome web services are nice to have, but happy users are more important.
So for the past few months, we’ve been hunting for an alternative web server. We can’t use IIS because its footprint is too heavy. Most IT departments won’t allow us to install IIS on client machines.
We could use Apache. It has a nice embeddable version, but interacting with it via C# is tricky. We’d prefer something a little more Microsoft-native.
That basically leaves us with one commercial option and two open source options.
(If you know of other web servers worth investigating, please let us know in the comments!)
More important than picking an alternative web hosting framework for Infovark is the timing of the switch. We don’t want to impede future development.
As a stopgap, we might try plugging in the Spark View Engine to replace our current XML-XSLT-XHTML rendering path. Who knows? If it improves our web development flow, we might be able to keep our WCF base after all.
Recently, I made a plea for the adoption of Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) in computer applications. It’s a sensible recommendation, and I stand behind it.
The folks working on HTML 5 are proposing a <time> element for the new standard. This makes sense to me. It will help eliminate some of the objections people have raised to the datetime design pattern proposed by the microformats team.
So, problem solved, right? We use UTC for time, and the usual calendar notation for dates. Neat.
Wait a minute. By “the usual” calendar notation, do we mean the modern Gregorian calendar, or…
Peter-Paul Koch, a.k.a. PPK, author of the quirksmode blog, reminds us that calculating historical calendar dates is hard. Really, really hard.
He provides an overview of the major calendar reforms in the Western world and points out that the reforms were adopted by different countries at different times. So forming a consistent timeline requires a knowledge of both time and place.
And many important historical dates float. The rules that determine when Easter occurs in the church calendar are complicated, and Orthodox and Catholic calendars disagreed for many years. In the medieval period, years were often numbered according to the local monarch’s reign. In Roman times, extra days were added to the official calendar by decree to prevent the seasons from drifting too far out of line.
If we want to make the <time> element safe for historical use, programmers would have to deal with this mess.
As useful as having universal, consistent <time> element metadata would be, that’s just too hard. Frankly, I skimmed the last bits of PPK’s article myself, and I’m actually interested in the issue. Most working programmers won’t bother.
While it’d be nice to have trustworthy time data, we’re not likely to get it. The standard should reflect that. I vote for assigning a cutoff date for the <time> element. January 1, 1970 works for me.