|
December 4, 2000 |
 |
Doing .Net In Internet Time
continued... Page 2 of 2
One month into the project, the development team sat down to re-evaluate its decision to go with .Net, to see whether it needed to change course before it was past the point of no return. Development was taking the same amount of time because of the learn-ing curve, but with the fewer lines of code and being virtually forced to use good, object-oriented design, members decided to continue with .Net. It's a decision they haven't regretted.
The only trouble the team has had so far has been with the Visual Studio .Net development environment, although a daily reboot keeps things under control. This isn't surprising with beta software, but it has hurt productivity. Nevertheless, the development team says no one would consider going back to the old way of doing things. They find that development work is once again fun and exciting.
ASPFree.com is one of the best sources of information about development with Microsoft's Active Server Pages. Steve Schofield originally started the site as a collection of ASP resources. As he found interesting solutions to his own development project on the Web, he added them to the site to form a central information repository. Despite his role as Webmaster being more of a hobby than a full-time job, the site gets 1 to 2 million hits each month in about 200,000 unique sessions.
Schofield recently began implementing pieces of .Net on the site, taking advantage of the ability of ASP.Net to run side-by-side with existing ASP applications. Even though the technologies each uses are quite different, .Net has made it easy for him to implement new features without breaking existing ones. Because the .Net Framework and Visual Studio tools aren't likely to be out much before the middle of next year, Schofield is running the site on beta software. But he says beta 1 is the "best pre-beta software from Microsoft or any other company," extremely stable and efficient.
The site uses .Net in various places. One link off the site, DevLinks, lets a user search a database of development links by word or combinations of words. The link is implemented as a .Net Web Service, which allows remote-method invocation on other Web sites via HTTP. Based on the fledgling Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) of the World Wide Web Consortium standard, it invokes a method on a site maintained by Robert Chartier, who has cataloged the links and allows searching of the database. This is a good example of the vision Microsoft has for Web services on different sites providing unique services for other Web sites and applications.
Performance on the site has gotten a boost from ASP.Net's caching abilities, and Schofield has found the server-side HTML controls help speed development, eliminating the need for kludgey state-management code. The site has run on a Windows 2000 Server since January of this year, using, once again, pre-release software. It is hosted for him by DataReturn.
Schofield sees several advantages in moving to .Net as a Web-development platform because it dilutes the learning curve and makes development more efficient. .Net applications require less code, don't have conflicts with dynamic link libraries, and are more fun to code. Schofield even remembers the last day that he did any Active Server Page coding--July 10, 2000--and intends to never look back.
Not all companies are ready to make the jump to .Net (it's only in early beta, after all), but many are finding that there are plenty of ways to get ready for it. One of the best ways is to build applications today on the Windows Distributed InterNet Architecture, DNA, and the updated Windows DNA 2000. DNA describes flexible, scalable, distributed applications using Windows technologies. Susan Lally, the VP of engineering for OpenTable .com, a hospitality network and request broker for restaurant reservations in North America, says now that they've built the system on DNA she's looking at what .Net can do for the site.
OpenTable is building a set of what it calls nodes using Windows DNA--nodes are restaurants that are running its Electronic Reservations Book. The software handles all online reservations as well as the phone-reservation service. The software supports customer-relationship management, demographics collection, and lets the restaurant assign customers and servers to specific tables using a floor plan of the restaurant, designed to maximize restaurant throughput. The company provides reservation interfaces for consumers, hotel concierges, and services to other Web sites.
The system is set up in multiple tiers. As part of its contract with restaurants, OpenTable provides a machine running Windows NT that runs a proprietary client-server application for in-house operations and handles requests for reservations. Because each reservation request is handled at each restaurant node in real time, there isn't a problem with reservations that can't be honored. The software listens for Internet requests at each node. OpenTable then loads all the results of a user's search into a user interface on the server, depending on the source of the request for reservation information.
The servers are running Windows 2000, with load balancing for the Web server and other machines for the middle-tier logic layer with COM and Microsoft Transaction Server. OpenTable is using SQL Server 7.0, but it plans to move to SQL Server 2000. The company used to operate on a Java, Oracle, and Sun solution, but found it to be too high maintenance. With the all-Microsoft technologies, Lally says they've been able to capitalize on more of an out-of-the-box solution. So far, they're happy with the move, she says. Best of all, they've been experiencing 99.9% up time on the servers.
Like other companies, OpenTable is working to understand .Net and what it could mean for their operations. But because it has built the existing system on DNA, the company will be able to make the move to .Net gradually, as the .Net components are released. It's looking at the features in ASP.Net that allow running compiled code within a Web page and is considering taking advantage of SQL Server 2000's distributed partition views.
The services that OpenTable provides seem almost custom-designed for a Web service, part of the .Net Framework. The company is aggressively marketing its services among travel sites. When a consumer on such a site wants to make dinner reservations, the request can be packaged in a SOAP envelope and sent to OpenTable, which responds with a list of matching restaurants in the price range, time window, and with available reservations.
While waiting for .Net to materialize as shipping products, OpenTable is implementing discrete pieces, particularly the server products that Microsoft has already released, and figuring out how to make intelligent decisions about providing better service with the new technologies.
.Net is generating interest and enthusiasm, proving itself in distributed applications in a variety of fields. It's an ambitious undertaking for Microsoft and for early adopters. Being a pioneer is always a risk--they're the first to get shot--but so far, no one seems to regret stepping so boldly into the new frontier.
Photo of Schofield by Joe Polimeni
return to page 1
Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page
This Week's Issue
Technology Whitepapers
- Mobile BI: Actionable Intelligence for the Agile Enterprise
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- How To Regain IT Control In An Increasingly Mobile World - by BlackBerry
- Red Alert: Why Tablet Security Matters - by BlackBerry
- New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows
