The elation of starting a new blog has passed as it seems I’m not posting as often… something to fix in the near future.

I'm going write about Monorail a little bit more (see my previous post).Web development with Monorail is easy, although it takes some time (not much) to wrap one's head around the way the code is written. Adding new feature to the website is just as simple as having those features in the original design. I enjoy working with it and I can focus on adding content instead of thinking about how to follow DRY (Don’t repeat yourself) principle as I had to sometimes in ASP.NET (as I’ve mentioned before I’m lazy).

In my opinion benefits outweigh the disadvantages and so I’m sticking with it.
Benefits:

• Faster development
• Enforces good design practices resulting in easy to understand and maintain code
• Responsive community (ASP.NET has a bigger and just as responsive community, so getting help there can be easier if you know the right people)
• Support for simple template engine (in addition to “.aspx”)

Disadvantages:

• Lack of documentation (there are tutorials, but not everything is covered)
• Learning curve
• Template engine (a separate dependency project on which Monorail relies) is out of date and is not being worked on (there are problems in it that weren’t fixed since 2003, although people are starting to talk about working on it to fix the bugs at least)
• Small community
• No third party support (no controls or anything similar to the ASP.NET world, but usually it’s not important)

I’m sure I’ve missed something so feel free to leave a comment and I’ll update the post. The point though is that Monorail benefits are big while disadvantages are small.

The only concern I have is that community is still very small. If for some reason developers would have to quit (like people quit working on nVelocity) the project could die easily. I would be left with code for the framework that is not maintained, but I doubt this will happen. All developers appear to be from different parts of the world so it’s highly unlikely for all of them to leave simultaneously. Community is also growing and more and more people are starting to contribute. In the end, I really think that the project can succeed if the authors would pull it together, update documentation and create a professional website in addition to wiki.