How can I reduce maintenance when my JavaScript and C# codebases overlap?

Question

I have a library with some objects that I use both from C# and JavaScript. There are several objects, let's call one of them Foo, with the same basic implementation in C# and JavaScript. When I want to transmit an object of this type from the server to the browser, I simply call Foo.ToJson() to serialize this object to JSON and then revive the object on the browser side with a safe eval() operation.

This is all well and good, but the library is becoming complex and the need to keep the JavaScript and C# code bases synchronized is increasingly difficult and error-prone. I'm interested in ideas for simplifying this architecture or making it easy to maintain. Thoughts?

Answer 1

You could look at using script#: http://projects.nikhilk.net/ScriptSharp

Since your classes are all coded in C#, you could reuse the same .cs file for both the server and client projects. that way, when you make changes, it's automatically compiled into the javascript :-)

Answer 2

have you considered making your "shared code" into a web service, this way any of your applications can access it, and you can make everything distributed to help with performance.

Just one solution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_services

Answer 3

1. Make the parts of your app that overlap as data-driven as possible. At a certain size, it's easier to have a state-machine interpreter running on both sides that can parse the same data.
2. Write the code once. There are a couple C# to JavaScript compilers you can look into. Script# and jsc.

Answer 4

Use DTOs. Data Transfer Objects.

This way if your JScript or C# objects change, your DTOs don't necessarily have to change unless that property is immediately required at the client. And even then, you have a clear separation of what is intended to be Serialized and what is not.

Dave Ward at Encosia speaks a lot about this.