Right now I'm not sure...
+5
A:
I'd say yes. I'm using it. I know for a fact that Universal are using it on some of their (thousands of) sites. I will add some caveats, however:
- There are serious problems with setting it up, especially if you want to debug into the libraries.
- The helper functions favour prototype, as opposed to the more modern jQuery. This is changing rapidly, however.
- The documentation is a bit chaotic, again the Castle Team are working on that.
I'm not guaranteeing every last "out-there" feature works, but the point of the system is actually to keep it simple.
Compared to vanilla ASP.NET, it's an absolute joy. I assure you that you won't miss viewstate.
Julian Birch
2008-11-05 23:36:05
What are the serious problems in setting up?... are your just referring the issues some people have with building it from trunk... or something else?
Bittercoder
2008-11-06 09:50:14
Thanks for this answer. I'm for sure I never miss viewstate, because the whole idea of ASP.NET WebForms was a bit strange after years of classic ASP. MVC gives me a much cleaner solution and right now I think we've choosen the right way.
Splash
2008-11-13 22:24:31
It's in use by Universal, as in, Universal Studios? How do you know? Can you provide links or contacts to ask about their experiences, maybe? Do their developers have blogs? I'd be really interested to hear about it!
Peter Mounce
2008-12-11 22:01:52
Bittercoder: Getting even a simple example working involves building it from trunk, which was a nightmare at the time of writing (it's much better now) and then actually getting anything done at first is a maze of blog posts most of which are no longer valid. It's much easier if you've got an experienced Monorail developer, but the initial curve is /steep/.Peter: I know because a friend of mine worked on some. I'm afraid I don't have much more information than that. It was definitely taken seriously as a delivery platform, however.
Julian Birch
2009-09-02 16:04:45
Since MR 2.0 was released a couple of months ago, do you still think that setting up a project is a problem?btw, even if it was a problem (say taking an extra day), this is a one-time-cost per project. Since you'd want a project to be long lived, a day is perhaps an ok price to pay for the gains. And it certainly is not a day, not even an hour.
Ken Egozi
2010-03-26 19:46:58
I have to admit, I haven't had cause to use MonoRail recently, so I couldn't honestly say. However, just having it released properly is a vast improvement over the situation 18 months ago. And it was /a lot/ longer than a day. In particular, it was sufficiently long that many developers would have serious trouble justifying the time invested to their boss with nothing to show for it other than "Hello World". When you've got MonoRail running and know how to make it sing, it's a completely different beast from trying to get it started.
Julian Birch
2010-04-22 15:53:12
Julian Birch
2010-04-22 15:55:00
+1
A:
We have been building a fairly large application with it for the past year and a half. Its been nice not to have to deal with the old ASP/Page based model and use the better Model/View/Controller design pattern.
To get the new stuff you really need to work off the trunk of development because they don't do releases very often. We have a lot of tests that get the framework involved so when an update in the framework breaks something we depend on we know about it immediately.
If you have to work in .NET this beats the heck out of the alternatives.
Gareth Farrington
2009-01-16 17:03:21
+1
A:
There is an overview on the monorail forum: http://forum.castleproject.org/viewforum.php?f=6
I'm using it for an application and haven't had any big issues with it. The biggest problem is indeed find good documentation and examples.
+1
A:
I've had no problems setting it up. Julian, I don't think it is constructive to say things like "serious problems" without any further clarification or example.
Debugging into the libraries is trivial. Because it's open source, you can debug into the whole thing.
nocache
2009-04-21 03:42:50
+1
A:
I've been using MonoRail for production for ages on many projects, as an employee, as an indie contractor, and for non-work related sites.
I know I'm biased on that, however I can whole heartedly promise that my positive usage experience is what lured me into contributing to the project, not the other way around.
Ken Egozi
2009-06-17 08:21:26