Where is NetTiers?

Question

I used NetTiers in several projects to work or two back. I found it extremely useful for creating front-end interfaces in ASP.NET web formats. The level of business and data was also pretty nice. I usually use NHibernate, but I think it may be excessive for these specific projects in terms of the time it takes to start.

Since then I have been working on projects where almost everything is addressed to end users. However, I recently got a side project that will have many supporting administrative functions, and wondered if NetTiers is still well-groomed and clean, like it was a couple of years ago. This does not seem to be the case, but I do not know if this means that he was actually abandoned, or if he was simply moved to another place. Or is there another product (preferably a set of CodeSmith templates) that might work better for me? All I really need is a clean ActiveRecord model that can get into the SQL database on the backend and create simple user interfaces for CRUD screens for most of my model objects. I need something that will do a deep load of object graphs like NetTiers.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I currently support the great NetTiers app, and my experience was usually a disappointment. I inherited the project and took care of the templates, fixed a number of errors in the templates and applied some scripts after generation to the generated files. IMHO the generated code is too verbose, suffers from massive duplication and will benefit from the greater use of generics. The templates I work with do not properly manage resources (newer versions of templates may be better). At some point, I decided to upgrade to a newer version, but the size of the exercise turned me off. Useful documentation is hard to find and answers to NetTiers questions are not straightforward. The overall impression that I have is a gradual decline.

If you are just after a simple .NET stack to create a user interface from an SQL database, I suggest you take a look at ASP.NET MVC3 with MvcScaffolding and Entity Framework. Add AutoMapper and Munq for DI.

Answer 2

We have been using NetTiers for several years. I think it tends to look overwhelming for users for the first time, in terms of the amount of material generated, and there are several limitations on the functionality and circular functions of DeepLoad. I also have the feeling that there haven’t been so many updates lately, but overall I had a lot of experience using Nettiers with a code cousin, and of all the ones I tried, he is clearly our favorite, with a huge performance boost. We use views, custom sps, indexes, etc.

In a comment to another answer: we tried Automapper and moved away from it due to the fact that it will work without changes when changing object structures. And moved away from the Entity Framework because we don’t like the manual encoding of our DALs. :)