Custom Website Framework
The Custom Website Framework, or cwf, is a framework built using .Net to make it easier developing and maintaining websites with dynamic content and lots of forms. Content Management Systems, or Cms, can handle sites with lots of content (texts/documents and images), but our framework is meant for community sites and Web 2.0 sites. Sites where most of the content is generated by the visitors/users.
ASP.NET
A part of Microsoft's .Net framework is ASP.NET, a framework
meant to be used when building web applications. Using a very small
part of ASP.NET, I've build my own framework with the features I
need.
This very small, but very important, part of ASP.NET are 2
interfaces. The interfaces are the IHttpModule and the IHttpHandler
interfaces. If you create classes and let them implement these
interfaces, you can high-jack the requests from the web server and
stream whatever you like back to the visitors. This is exactly what
cwf does. Cwf does not contain any ASP.NET (aspx)
files/pages.
A site implemented using cwf will have some files for the design
(gif, jpg, js, css), a web.config file and some Dll's. That's
it.
Framework
What is a framework?
My definition is that a framework is some code somebody wrote that
will make life easier for other developers. An earlier term for the
same, is API. The .Net framework is alot of code written by the
developers at Microsoft, that makes the life of many Windows
developers easier.
Why build your own?
When you have been building web applications for more than 10 years
like I have, you learn that you need the same features on most
sites you build. Instead of having to spend 80% of your time doing
the same over and over again, it could be building forms and
collecting submitted data from them, you sit down and create some
generic classes that can be used on all (or most) of the solutions
you create. That's the start of a framework.