Beyond ASP.NET

Question

Hi team,

the first CTP release surely looks promising.
Surely it is just the first CTP and a lot of definitely needed stuff is missing (as indicated by Kevin in another thread and in his blog posting).

Personally, I will die for a feature-complete Velocity to be used in my WCF-based applications - I do not care too much about ASP.NET.
In the end, ASP.NET is yet another frontend technology

Thanks.

Answer 1

Thanks, Christian. We certainly look at this CTP as the first step, and we know there's a lot more we need to do on this front.

Re ASP.NET, there are many ASP.NET applications that can benefit from using Velocity (at least as a session-state provider) in a relatively seamless fashion, and we know that that's a fairly big pain point for customers today. That said, Velocity isn't tied to ASP.NET; we do expect it (even with the current CTP functionality) to be usable in other applications as well

 

S Muralidhar

Architect

Answer 2

So, can someone blog about (or, describe here) the features that are in the current CTP that are useful right now for the desktop (non-web, even non-intranet) - ie, data caching for applications?

 

One area that I'm interested in is the use of customized desktop search (either WDS or the older Indexing Service), where a specific file-type might be indexed and then used (via a customized application) as a file catalog / workflow organizer. That is, a catalog of documents that are continually worked on by another, specialized application.

 

You can think of the seldom used Journalling function that Outlook has, for tracking Office document types.

 

(I think that old hardware, poor threading model, and other factors meant that turning Journalling ON was the worst thing that a dektop user could do; it may be different in 2008 - perhaps MOSS makes it redundant).

 

This is not just a static files list, but serves as a centre for workflow scheduling and distribution. In its wider usage, these file catalogs are used in a distributed fashion (LAN). So, the caching model that Velocity has (by my reading of it) is well suited for such scenarios; the updating and "expiry time" factors are important for the administartion of the file catalogs and the derived workflow management system.

 

Answer 3

I wanted to point out that NCache 3.2 already has all the features (and much more) that Velocity CTP1 has now, what it is  promising in CTP2 and also its first final release. Some of the features to highlight are Mirrored, Replicated, Partitioned, Partition-Replica, and Client Cache topologies. NCache also has dynamic clustering to let you add or remove cache servers at runtime.

Read more about NCache at http://www.alachisoft.com.

 

Thanks,

 

Iqbal Khan

Alachisoft