DotVVM VS Saturn

Have a look at DotMVVM. They've gone to great lengths to provide a gradual upgrade process for Webforms projects.

If you have any experience with modern web development, this could actually be a great opportunity. I'm in a similar situation with an application that is extremely old and running on Web Forms (and in VB.NET, god I hate that language). Pretty much every developer on my team has no idea how to build a modern web site, so I get to run pretty much everything related to modernization. It's great experience for the resume. I would recommend using DotVVM (https://www.dotvvm.com) for a rewrite. It's not very popular yet, but it lets you iteratively migrate web forms apps to a .NET Core compliant application. From there, you could rewrite even further into something like React.

DotVVM is an ASP.NET framework that allows us to create web applications using the MVVM (Model, View, ViewModel) pattern with C# and HTML.

I have one first step for the upgrade: Change WebForms to DotVVM. Sadly, that is already an enormous task :(

Today I don't have a new series to start with but rather a simple example which may or may not grow in another blog series. For the moment we'll talk about how to do File uploads to an F# backend powered by Falco and Saturn so let's get started!

Bix is a micro-framework designed with F# in mind and that runs on both Deno and Bun! and in theory it also should even run in a service worker! (intercepting fetch requests) although I haven't tested that yet, it offers a general purpose handler that coupled with a set of route definitions it can bring a Giraffe/Saturn like framework to life in JavaScript runtimes which is incredibly awesome! useful? maybe not 😅, but awesome indeed. Let's see some code for it

Backend: Most likely it would be a toss between https://saturnframework.org or https://giraffe.wiki. They both combins the extremely good type system in F# combined with the ease of a minimal API.

The "S" stands for Saturn. Suave is not very popular.

While for a proof of concept Suave did great, I switched it in favor of Saturn given my familiarity with it and some ASP.NET code.

Saturn is heavily inspired by phoenix and has similar generators, and a channel system that is similar. As well as almost the exact same syntax for the router with plugs and all.

Today we'll try to keep it as simple as possible but no promises, since this entry is about creating web servers in F# using Saturn and not only that, we'll also try to go for a more traditional'ish MVC.

🌱release on github