Comments on: Is Oxite the future of blogging?

By: Erik Porter

Erik Porter — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:58:11 +0000

Thanks for the really honest feedback everyone. Appreciate it and find it all very interesting (I'm one of the guys on the team that built Oxite).

Oxite is really focused on being a great example of ASP.NET MVC for devs, so to your points about it not being very usable for the masses...that is by design. As I mentioned (and was quoted above in the article), it doesn't mean we won't someday be good for the masses. We're definitely wanting to see where the community wants to take this.

Regarding deploying to commercial hosting, it is definitely doable. There are certain components of Oxite that require certain permissions so you have to deploy to a host that supports them (we're building a list of hosts to put up on Code Plex soon), but it is definitely doable. Two of us on the team are already running test versions on two different hosting providers and it's working well so far (we'll also update the list of sites running Oxite soon too since there will be a few more soon). ASP.NET MVC can run from the bin directory so there are no deployment issues there either.

If you have any questions I can answer, send me a tweet: http://twitter.com/humancompiler

By: Andrew Rickmann

Andrew Rickmann — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:30:43 +0000

OK, I will give you that. It would be nice if it were more usable by the masses. I wouldn't have known how to deploy it to a web server and I don't think you could right now (on a commercial host) what with the framework being beta.

Hopefully when they have developed it further it will do that. Perhaps they want the community to set the direction so it isn't viewed as an MS project.

However it evolves it will be nice to have more competition.

By: ringmaster

ringmaster — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:21:24 +0000

I agree that there are good and valid reasons to use .net, though I wish that .net developers would focus on ultimate results more than creating tools. As you concluded, "the interesting thing is the approach and the underlying code, not the actual platform," it would be great if some of these open .net projects would result in applications that are out-of-the-box useful.

I don't doubt that Oxite will evolve into such a platform, especially having seen how it's applied to good effect on the Mix site and Microsoft blogs. It's just interesting to me how open .net code seems to evolve downward from high-concept approach to pragmatic implementation.

Look at .text as an example. It was completely unusable when it was released. I had trouble figuring out even how to obtain it because it was mired in then arcane .net repositories, just for the sake of using these new .net resources, not because they were useful for deployment.

Perhaps it's not fair to judge this new project by those old standards, but I see this phenomenon happening to many coders even these days. Ruby devs also have this problem. Lots of cool stuff in the language, but mostly only usable by people familiar with the tech to begin with, and not for the masses.

By: Andrew Rickmann

Andrew Rickmann — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:05:36 +0000

I don't think that's a particularly fair characterisation of the developers who have released this, or of Windows Server devs. There are very good and valid reasons to use .Net and the guys who have released this aren't a program group, they just thought it would be useful to offer out the code they had used for a few of their own projects.

By: ringmaster

ringmaster — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:33:46 +0000

As with most things in the .net world, the developers seem more interested in the neat-factor of .net than they do in producing practical working applications.

Windows Server users whose administrators won't install PHP or Apache would otherwise have suffered with a larger packages that don't do blogging specifically well at all. There's little doubt in my mind that Oxite will be a big player in the blog world for corporate users who can't (for whatever stupid reason) run a LAMP stack.