Developer roadmap - 1. Moving to MVC. Your thoughts.

nopCommerce team | a.m. wrote:

Andrei, the result of the vote clearly states that it is up to you to deside.

Best Regards
Thomas Nørby
Vingummi

rcnopcom wrote:

We do not have the manpower to create and maintain both.

Needs to be one or the other.

While I don't doubt the merits of MVC platform, Web Forms seems to be doing the job reasonably well up to now which  will continue to be supported by Microsoft. .NET 4 has seen several worthwhile enhancements such as granular control of viewstate, ViewStateMode and ClientIDMode. The adoption of JQuery by MS is another major step towards smarter web pages.

There is still many improvements to that can be achieved using the current technology so it's not time to throw in the towel just yet.

You run the risk of disenfranching at least 50% of your loyal and valuable developers network

At least finish off the current roadmap as there are several features and enhancements that are needed to really make NC an equal to many of the widely used eCom solutions in the market. I just don't see a complelling reason to swap over mid stream. One in particular I am very keen to see is multi store.

My vote is to stay with Web Forms, finish off what's been started with the current roadmap, then draw the line, put that version into a maintenance phase and then look to creating a new project, nopCommerce V2 as MVC.

Murray

MVC is more complex than just having Web Forms. MVC requires learning a new way of thinking of web applications.

Yes, MVC does do a good job of abstracting the Model, View, and Controller but it is not neccessary.

I say keep nopCommerce the way it is and focus on performance optimization by using SQL stored procedures and minimizing connections to the database server.

nopCommerce team | retroviz wrote:

Yes, I sort of figured that was the case otherwise you wouldn't be asking for feedback. But it is good to have this confirmed. At least we know it will be one or the other.

edix wrote:

Is there any breakdown of common reasons behind the YES and NO answers?
IF the main reason many said no to moving to MVC now is because of dev work they have done extending their instances with web forms controls, etc
and
IF the main reason the folks that said yes to moving to MVC now was because they haven’t done much(other than minor tweaks) and want to learn MVC
then my two cents would definitely be to weight the “NO”s more.

I'm all for it.  I'm building a portal application for my wife's business' web site in ASP.NET MVC, and there really aren't any good open source ASP.NET MVC e-commerce products/projects out there right now (at least the last time I checked).  I'm actually just sort of waiting for the .NET community to catch up to the MVC because honestly we're lagging behind the open source community on this one (think Ruby on Rails).  I would probably feel differently about the headache a migration project would mean for an upgrade if I had already put a lot of time into my nopCommerce store, but I think it'd put you guys in a great leadership position if you took this approach.  You should make it as easy as possible for people to migrate their existing sites, though.  Fortunately, moving from ASP.NET to ASP.NET MVC isn't going to be as difficult for ASP.NET developers as the move from "classic" ASP to .NET was, as long as you have a solid OO foundation you should be fine.

Moving to MVC seems to be lots of turmoil that we can do without at present, better things to focus on first.

It would just tie up the development for months with initially little more to show at the end of it. Clients aren't interested in architecture - they are interested in what their site does, how stable it it, features it has, how fast it runs, etc.

As to SEO, I think the advantages are overplayed. Nop could make other much  smaller changes like reducing the size of the viewstate (that does get much bigger than other ASP.NET carts I've tried). Also focusing on being stable and supporting sites with hundreds of thousands of products.

Sandman wrote:

MVC is much faster than webforms and doesn't have viewstate. MVC works with HTTP, webforms works against HTTP.

There are of course areas which could be improved, but I think MVC move will overcome some of the current problems we face. I certainly see MVC as the future for ASP.NET websites, its much more orientated around DOM and UX which is what is needed!

The learning curve is not as bad as you may think, a couple of weeks and you will have a  good understanding, enough to amend nopCommerce MVC to suit your needs.

When this thread was started I had only just started looking in to MVC, Just yesterday I finished my first MVC website - I won't be looking back to web forms.

SilhouetteBS wrote:


beekde wrote:


Hi Andrei: I am not an expert but i have more than 25 years of experience in e-banking/e-commerce (started on that before internet was a WW reallity).

If "MVC is definitely not for everyone " at this stage NC will reduce its potential number of users by moving to MVC and requiring more expertise. I have noticed that many of NC users are begginers and you will lose many at this moment. The final user does not care if the application is ou-dated or not. Thay care for its functionality, eassyness to use and stability.

I go with Mike and SilhouetteBS "I think time would be better spent making nopCommerce easier to integrate with the current structure"

esides, ieems that MVC will be a major step and will have the pains and bugs of a migration.
Later you can move MVC