Our product has over 4300 tests. The server side UI tests are around 1500 in total but was causing the full test run to take 20 minutes. Recently adding only a handful of tests increased the total test run time to over 40 minutes. It turns out the useful Browser
testing component from the Nancy framework was expensive to create for each of our 1500 server side UI unit tests. Changing our Browser and bootstrapper configuration to run once per suite rather than once per test, resulted in our total test time being reduced to just over 5 minutes! That saving was worth the trade-offs we had to make. Continue reading
Category Archives: Server Side
Special offer: My Ext.NET book for $5 until 8th Jan 2016
Hi. Just a note that Packt Publishing, the publisher of my Ext.NET Web Application Development book, is running a massive sale campaign. All books, including mine, at $5 (in UK it is £4) until 8th Jan 2016. Get it here. … Continue reading
Ext.NET Ajax Requests: MVC, Web API or ASHX?
When I wrote the book on Ext.NET 2, I often described using ASHX or MVC Controllers (amongst other techniques) for getting data from Ext.NET Stores via AJAX Proxies.
Recently, I’ve received a few questions — and wondered myself — whether to use Web API instead. It has a cleaner method signature, and is intended for this kind of scenario where you want to return data rather than HTML.
I finally got a moment to compare all three (for my scenario). Continue reading
SignalR with Ext.NET
I’ve just written a post on the Ext.NET blog site looking at how you can use SignalR with Ext.NET
Book: Ext.NET Web Application Development
My book, Ext.NET Web Application Development has just been published by Packt Publishing.
The reviewers were none other than the Ext.NET team itself. They were excited about and dedicated to this book which would not have amounted to much without their involvement. They are also offering free copies with any purchases of Ext.NET!
Why Use XSLT in Server Side Web Frameworks For Output Generation?
Just as web developers want to use standards on the client side, standards such as XSLT on the server side may be an efficient way to create good quality markup and other web output.
It can help avoid the hard coded or hard to edit HTML strings that are often seen in server side templates and scripts.
As an open standard, XSLT is reasonably universal, and skills can be easily transferable.
Some people don’t like it or have had bad experiences with it in the past.
But it can be a very powerful tool in the developer’s toolbox. Perhaps it is worth giving it another look?
This article looks at why XSLT could be useful as part of the View in an Model-View-Controller pattern, its benefits and potential drawbacks. Continue reading
PHP 5.3 Gets A Bit More Object Oriented And More
PHP 5 in general has been a good improvement over PHP 4, but those used to full blown object oriented program languages such as Java or C# may find some OO features still lacking in PHP 5.
PHP 5 has the usual things, such as classes, interfaces, abstract classes, inheritance, etc, but some useful programming constructs have been missing, though PHP 6, under development, aims to rectify that.
However, it seems that many of those features are going to be brought forward to the up-coming PHP 5.3 (which may make it more likely that it will get installed by web hosting companies sooner than they would likely go for PHP 6).
Sitepoint has an excellent summary of the features. The list of features include: Continue reading
ASP.NET Is a Leaky Abstraction
ASP.NET is a leaky abstraction because it tries to hide away some of the details of HTML markup generation for you when sometimes you need to know about the underlying markup.
In doing so, it is too easy to create ASP.NET sites that violate web accessibility guidelines and contain unnecessary markup bloat. In some cases, ASP.NET makes it really difficult to create the exact output you need. But there are a some options to address this problem. Continue reading