What disadvantages/problems are there when integrating Joomla and ASP.Net web pages?

Question

A friend of mine really likes using Joomla as a base for his websites. He also likes the power that Asp.Net has and can code in VB.Net.

He wants to use Joomla as the "Master Page" and Asp.Net/VB.Net/SQL Server to handle the main business logic of the application. He is planning on using the Joomla Wrapper Module (an IFrame, joomla modules) to integrate the ASP.Net into the Joomla website.

Joomla will be able to handle the security (users,roles,registration), menu (based on roles), static content (e.g. About Us page) and it will pass an Encrypted Username & Password to the Asp.Net web page (example here).

The goal of the website is to allow users to register & subscribe to a (free or paid) service where they will be able to customize content and download it as a file.

What disadvantages are there when doing this? Are there work arounds?

Some issues that I can think of are:

1. Links clicked in an IFrame won't change the browser's url which means that you can't bookmark pages and they aren't in the browsers history.
2. If Asp.Net has to know the users/roles (which is very likely) then it would have to access the Joomla database or keep its own user table which will have to be in sync with Joomla's users.

EDIT: I would never build a new website this way, but I was looking for concrete points to convince my friend that using Joomla and Asp.Net together isn't a good idea.

Answer 1

Seriously, IMHO, if you're not going to integrate some legacy system or isn't doing this kind of "integration" development as an "experiment" to learn something - in a summarized way, if you just want to have your work done, I think the description you provided inserts a lot of complexity and overhead that aren't needed in the first place.

This added complexity of two completely different ecosystems is a disadvantage to what should be just simpler. I really believe you should try to use Joomla or other CMS written in .net like dotnetnuke (or build your own) instead of this configuration.

If you add more information about what are the goals and objectives of this project, my opinion may change. Until them, I keep my opinion of simplicity.

Answer 2

I don't see what advantage you get from using Joomla when the app is ASP.net (nor the advantage of coding an ASP.net app when the framework uses PHP/MySQL).

I'm not convinced the security is tight because you can open iframes and bypass the Joomla security. Then you talk about passing username/password to the iframe - but now you need to validate this again through the ASP.net app.

I once coded an app in raw PHP and included it in a Joomla site using iframes. I realized fairly quickly that there was basically no security because the raw PHP had no knowledge of Joomla (although the app was not visible to site visitors and only known about by admin). I quickly recoded it into a built-in component.

To me, this sounds like you're reinventing the wheel on both sides of the app. If you want to use Joomla, either learn how to make components (it's pretty simple) and do it in PHP, or hire someone to do it for you ;).

If PHP is not your strong point, then use a full ASP.net site, perhaps with a CMS as GmonC suggested. Even creating your own basic CMS with some pre-built components (e.g. Telerik) would probably be quicker than integrating PHP and ASP.

Answer 3

The time and effort you are going to go through to use Joomla is going to far outweight what it would take to just get some other CMS that was designed for .NET.

Stop over-engineering yourself into a midlife crisis.

Also, Joomla? Seriously? Joomla?

Answer 4

me too don't get any advantages for joomla, it's big system and it just as good as wordpress for regular projects, just wordpress is much simplier. joomla has no good documentation to learn and hard to extend.