Oxite: A good example after all?

I haven’t been doing much web development these days, but I’m anticipating that will change in the near future. Consequently, I’ve been keeping an eye on the progress of the various web development frameworks, including ASP.NET MVC. When I heard about the Oxite project, I was very interested. Most example projects I find are just that: examples. Oxite is running a production website. I immediately downloaded the project sources and…still haven’t even looked at them.

In the meantime, the community response to Oxite has been…interesting. The general consensus seems to be that they got it all wrong. The last thing I’ve read on the topic (so far) is Glenn Block’s On Oxite post. Ouch! Right now I’m just picturing him running into the Oxite guys at the Microsoft Christmas party…

Once upon a time, I was a minor presence in the MS NNTP forums. This situation reminds me of something I noticed back then: The surest way to get a relevant and timely answer to your question would be to post a completely ridiculous solution, don your asbestos underwear, and wait for the responses to roll in.

Which gets me back to the matter at hand. These days, you can expect that any framework you’d consider using is going to come with with plenty of samples, examples, and documentation. General guidance, especially in the area of “what not to do”, is harder to come by. This is understandable. I’m sure most of us have had the experience of a customer (or co-worker) taking something we’ve done and use it in a manner that makes us cringe. It’s just very difficult to anticipate all the wrong directions that someone might go.

I think this makes the Oxite project almost invaluable as an example. I’ve bookmarked this post and you can be sure that if and when I get around to actually using ASP.NET MVC, I’ll read it again. Of course, this is no consolation for the Oxite folks, who probably feel a bit chastised at this point. No one wants to be thought of as the Gigli of…anything. Well guys, all I can say is thanks for sticking your neck out there on behalf of the rest of us.