Introducing Clockwork Web Framework for .NET

In 2003, I read a book, “Making Space Happen”, by Paula Berinstein. It’s about the efforts of entrepreneurs to open up space to the public. It’s the kind of thing that gets my propeller-head spinning, and after reading it I resolved to create the best website on space travel on the internet.

So, I sat down in a park and within two hours I had covered several sheets of paper with scribbles and scrawls of what my website needed. I had notes on authentication, web components, search boxes, themes, dynamic images, language toggles, and all kinds of stuff.

Being a good little programmer, the more I designed, the more intricate the design became, and pretty soon I was knee-deep in code. Flash forward six years later, and I have yet to write a single page of that space website!

But I do have a web framework :)

What It Is

Clockwork makes it easy to build powerful .NET web sites. It’s completely free, open source (under the Apache 2 license) and you can use it in proprietary or open source projects, as you like.

Some of the ways it makes web development easy:

• Database-agnostic data access
• Dynamically displays content in different languages
• Leverages the .NET 3.5 framework, including the Provider Model, generics, LINQ, automatic properties, and more
• Integrates with popular web services such as those provided by UserVoice, LinkedIn, Google and Yahoo!
• Makes it really easy to use object-oriented programming standards like Dependency Injection / Inversion of Control, Repositories, and Specifications

Under the hood I use many popular components, including NHibernate for database access, Castle Windsor for Dependency Injection, and log4Net for logging.

Although today marks the official public release, the framework is currently at version 3.x because I’ve been using earlier versions of it in production websites since 2004.

I’ve built Clockwork using as many web standards as I can find, as many of the latest .NET elements as possible, software best practices, and a lot of love and stubbornness.

What It Will Become

Well, it’s obviously too early to say. But I am committed to continuing to develop it, I have a long list of things I plan to add, and I’m hopeful a community of .NET developers will adopt it and push it into areas I can’t even imagine today.

Please take a minute to visit the website and learn more about it. I hope you find it helpful.

Many thanks,

Nick

NHibernate Performance Profiling with NHProf

NHibernate

I’ve been using NHibernate a lot recently. It’s an Object Relational Mapping software that makes it easy to “map” between SQL database syntax and standard C# object models. The goal is to talk to databases, by writing code like this:

var query = session.CreateQuery("from WebPage p where p.VirtualPath like :path")
.SetString("path", "%pages%")
IList<WebPage> list = query.List<WebPage>();

Now behind the scenes, there’s a relational database somewhere – and transactions, and validation, and syntax parsing, and query analyzing, and all of that standard relational database stuff – but as a programmer I just need to know about my object model and it will return me a list of WebPage objects and I can easily use them in my code, update them, and delete them. Shiny!

NHibernate is a straight port of Hibernate, from the Java world where it originally evolved many years ago. So the concepts behind it have been field-tested for in both Java and (now) .NET shops. This makes it a very robust ORM tool. Did I mention it is completely FREE?

While it’s amazing software, it comes with a big learning curve. There isn’t much documentation out there – and most of it is on blogs and wikis. I’ve bought Manning’s NHibernate In Action and that helps a bit. However, there isn’t much information on common performance and configuration traps.

Learning and Analyzing With NHProf

So I was glad to find out about NHProf, a profiling and analyzing tool for NHibernate created by one of NHibernate’s main developers (Oren Eini aka Ayende Rahien). His colleagues are Christopher Bennage and Rob Eisenberg.

Essentially the profiler is a slick-looking Windows Presentation  Foundation executable that “records” your application as it writes statistical data to the NHibernate log file, then provides a graphical view of the various things that are going on under the hood.

The interface is well thought out, with only a few tabs and windows, so the information is easy to sort through. Here’s a screenshot of the main interface:

What I Like About It

Now to the things I really like about this software:

First, you can see the exact SQL query that NHibernate is generating. Straightforward, but critical. There is a related Stack Trace which allows you to jump to the part of your code where you executed this statement.

As well, you can view the rows that are returned by any query. This makes it easy to see exactly what data you are getting back – a much-needed sanity check at times :)

 

Each NHibernate action is evaluated against known best practices (or bad practices) and you get “Alerts” that can provide more information on what to do (or not do).

For example, while running some recent queries, I received the following alert: “Too many cache calls per session”.

 

This leads me to the final element that I LOVE – the “read more” and “NHibernate Guidance” features. Software is so complicated that I just want to get it working most of the time – but I know that if I really understood it, I would avoid a lot of bugs and future issues.

So what makes this software shine for me is the care that has gone into helping people learn NHibernate. By clicking “read more”  you go straight to a web page that teaches you about that particular error and ways to avoid it – including code samples!

 

As well, there is a “Guidance” option that you can always access to learn about general NHibernate performance issues such as “Select N+1” or “Unbounded Result Set”. I’ve already applied the lessons from “Unbounded Result Set” and “Do Not Use Implicit Transactions” to my code and the result is much better performance and stability.

One thing I would like is the ability to hover over an alert in the statement in the main window, and actually see a tooltip of the alert message. At the moment you can see the icon showing the alert, but then have to click on the statement and then click on the “Alerts” tab at the bottom to see what it’s for.

NHProf is still in final beta but I have been using it for about a month and have found it to be very stable. I just bought my copy – there is a discount right now before it hits RTM and I think it has already been worth the money.

I would recommend this to anybody using NHibernate.