Re-thinking Convention
I’ve been playing more and more with Ruby On Rails lately and it has been a very mind-opening experience with regards to many of my ideas around application architecture. There are many wonderful things about Rails, but the idea (and implemenations) of “convention over configuration” is demonstrated beautifully within Rails.
My development experience has been primarily centered around .Net since the early betas of .Net 1.0. I’ve completed dozens of production systems with .Net and there are many ideas and thought processes that repeat themselves over and over throughout each project. In some of my earlier projects, I played with the idea of convention and decided that there was too much “magic” in many of the convention-based implementations that I participated in. After a few different attempts, I finally gave up on convention and fell back to the typical .Net configuration as the norm for my projects.
I have to say that Ruby On Rails has completely changed my views on the power of convention. From my (limited) experience with Rails, I would have to say that the conventions that are built into Rails provide provide a ton of acceleration in producing working web applications. I love the idea that almost everything is based on convention.
The way Rails encourages convention provides for rapid development, prototyping, and results in cheaper applications. Convention is encouraged throughout Rails by assuming that you are following convention (plural table names, primary keys named id, urls indicating actions, etc.) while still allowing the flexibility to deviate from the conventions when necessary.
I’m still not sure that one-off conventions are extremely valuable in .Net because they would not be standard conventions and would likely widely differ between projects and across companies. I think that the potential is there, but some type of framework would need to be established to (at least partially) encourge common conventions across projects. As an idea, convention is a very powerful concept, especially when it’s built into a framework (or an acceleration platform). I’m hoping that something is on the horizon that will provide this concept to .Net and that it gains traction soon. I would love to be able to write .Net applications at the speed that I can implement Rails applications.