Status of Spark View Engine

Question

It’s been a while since the community got any feature releases from the spark team. Has it ceased development? With the advent of Razor, has Louis moved on?
The least release was in March and the last development build was in July

Answer 1

Well, the pace is not furious but there has certainly been activity since March:

http://github.com/loudej/spark/commits/master

I hope that Razor does not kill Spark. They are very complementary.

Spark is really mark-up with some code in it while Razor is more like code containing mark-up.

Answer 2

It is quickly becoming obsolete. Very little has been done all year. Out of the box it does not work with .Net v4. It can be rebuilt, it seems, to work with v4 but when I did that most unit tests failed (likely from assembly loading issue caused by NUnit loading Framework v2 version of mscorlib ahead of Spark loading v4 of mscorlib). Also, Razor - which is eerily similar to Spark in some ways - will be in the box, and maybe the default engine - for MVC 3. Our team has serious reservations about using Spark for any more sites, but we also find ourselves in a limbo waiting for Razor (over WebForms).

Answer 3

Spark most certainly isn't dead I'm happy to say that work is currently under way to ensure compatibility with MVC 3. Support for dynamic view compilation to .NET 4 is already in the master branch although an official release hasn't be done yet.

We're currently working on releasing NuPack and OpenWrap packages that will provide an easy way of getting references to the latest release which up until now has required a source code download and local compile. This is not ideal, so using packages will mean anyone can use the latest version.

I have written about Razor and Spark here, and as a final note, development on Spark hasn't stopped - there just haven't been that many feature requests over the last few months - mainly just bug fixes.