Any experience of using Naked Objects frameworks for .net?

Question

On first sight, Naked Objects look very promising in that they allow a full system with a basic UI to be created quickly, then refined.

Has anyone got real life experience using any of the .net Naked Objects frameworks?

How should I choose between the different Naked Objects frameworks?

Does anyone know of a .net Naked Objects frameworks that is open source, or at least does not have a per user licence cost when the finished application is deployed?

Answer 1

(FYI, we are very close to launching a brand new version of the product - Naked Objects MVC. This works with ASP.NET MVC 2 and gives you a complete HTML UI from the same domain objects, and then (if you really need to!) you can customise this UI using standard ASP.NET MVC patterns.

Best of all - from the point of view of your question - this will not have a per user license cost. There will be a per-developer cost (not yet fixed, but realistically priced) and there will be a free time-unlimited evaluation version (which runs locally but not on a remote IIS Server).

If you're interested in trying this out, please get in touch with me (rpawson at nakedobjects.net)

Answer 2

Ian, the source is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nakedobjects/ but it's only Java. But I guess you could run it through Microsoft's Java to .Net converter.

Answer 3

As there is not an open source port of Naked Object to .net, the options at present seem to be:

• Naked Object MVC (licensed per developer, cost very reasonable, no source code)
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data – A attempt by Microsoft to solve the same problem. (free, no source code, does not seem to be “actively promoted” by Microsoft)

In both cases I have to ask myself how long will they be actively developed.

Answer 4

Naked Objects MVC does include (in the licensed version) the source code of the MVC UI part - though it does not include the source code of the underlying Naked Objects for .NET framework. The latter is in use in a big way in the Irish government. FYI, part of the commitment to that client is that in the event that our company is no longer able/willing to actively develop and support the product, then it will automatically revert to an open source license - I think that's as fair a commitment as one can make.

Also, FYI, though Dynamic Data has some similarities, it is not really the same thing: it does not expose object behaviour in the form of actions. This is a much bigger deal than it might sound. I agree that Microsoft does not appear to be actively promoting DD now, though. There was an attempt to re-implement DD within ASP.NET MVC, but that also has since been removed from CodePlex.