First time I've heard of Nancy. Anyone got a URL since it's name is so terrible that you can't google it?

I had the same problem. I googled "Mono Nancy" and eventually found this:

https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy

EDIT: It seems to be a .NET clone of node.js

No, it's a Sinatra-inspired framework for .NET ...and it's quite good!

(Thus the name. Frank Sinatra's daughter is named Nancy Sinatra)

no it's not. it's a .NET clone of sinatra. it's a web framework. it has little to nothing to do with node.js. although .net have pretty powerful multiprocessing and async routines, and can therefore be connected to node.js without too much effort.

If you don't mind me asking, I'm stuck trying to get the project templates to work with Monodevelop 4. I'm using this repository to run the latest Mono and Monodevelop on Fedora: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/tpokorra:/mo...

When I open the vsix file, all I get is a hexdump. I also tried installing it as an add-in, but it doesn't appear to accept vsix files.

The goal is to get past step one of these instructions: https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy/wiki/Introduction

How to make this work, pretty please?

monodevelop is not really supported. i would try compiling the latest mlnodevelop and see if there is a fork of the nancy templates.

you can work around that issue if you make an empty asp.net project and then use nuget to install-package nancy.hosting.aspnet

at least i think so, i haven't been doing .net in a while

SUCCESS! I followed these:

http://rubygems.org/gems/albacore/versions/1.0.0.rc.1 (for the command to install albacore), and

https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy/wiki/Running-Nancy-on-your-...

This works on Fedora and probably other distributions as well, though this uses HTTP which might be less optimal than FastCGI with Fos. I got Fos to compile with Mono but it's not usable yet, it can't find IAppBuilder in my "console" application no matter what references or using directives I add. Nowin compiles cleanly but the example projects don't, so it'll take some effort to get it to work. Things are progressing, though. But I really can't recommend anyone use Mono for web development as it stands.

How does it compare to Web API?

Nancy, like Sinatra, is a general-purpose web framework. You could implement an API in it, or you could implement a user-facing website.

Nancy and Sinatra are typically used for smaller sites. They're based around routes, controllers, and views but they don't (for better or worse) lock you into an MVC project structure like ASP.Net MVC or Rails.

Web API, by comparison, is pretty much "just for implementing a web-based API" and not something you'd want to use for a user-facing web application that serves up HTML pages.

ServiceStack [1] is a closer comparison to Web API. A lot easier to set up and runs in Mono, but not free (although it is open source [2]).

[1] - http://servicestack.net [2] - https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack

.NET clone of node.js would be nice, because I like the idea of node.js but not enough to ditch all my .NET stuff (especially entity framework).

There's nothing in node.js that you can't get with .NET/Mono except for JavaScript, and even if you must run JS for some reason there are some solutions (like IronJS).

Edge.js might interest you. It's an interop library for .Net and node.js: http://tjanczuk.github.io/edge/#/

Entity Framework is really not a good excuse. .NET has lots of great things going for it. Entity Framework is firmly on the "enterprise .NET" list of such items though.

.NET has always been able to do what Node does anyway. It has had HttpListener since v1.0...

Think you'll be getting a shock in a couple of years if you think the EF is enterprise. It's changed massively and coding without it is becoming a little like coding javqscript without jQuery.

You can do it, but why bother writing all those crud operations yourself??

Even with complicated SQL you can hand roll it and then tell the EF which class you're.returning and it'll handle all the boring `rs.GetInt(rs.GetOrdinal("ID"))` crap.

I think that the LINQ integration with EF is nice.. but EF in and of itself isn't all that great imho... Most of what it does is generate types to correspond to your database tables.

When you use a language with real variable types, it's less of an issue... If you really want it, you could shoehorn generators and other db platforms into the hyena[1] package.

In general, I've found that using databases tend to be much more straight forward under node, and that using ORM tools are less necessary.

[1] https://www.npmjs.org/package/hyena

C# (.NET4+) has real variable types, and a library to use them for database access.

Using Type dynamic - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264736.aspx

https://github.com/robconery/massive

When you use dynamic, you lose the biggest advantage of C# in general, intellisense in VS. Don't get me wrong, it can be great to use dynamic at times... I just feel you're losing the advantage that VS/C# give you when you do, so you may as well be using something else. (I like node.js)

I started something along these lines a while ago. Haven't touched in quite some time though.

https://github.com/martydill/node.fs

OWIN will give some of what you are looking for.

I haven't tried them yet, but here are some directions I found (on /r/dotnet) a few days ago for tweaking MVC5 so it runs correctly on Mono:

http://curtis.schlak.com/2014/02/04/setup-asp-net-mvc-4-on-m...

What *nix needs is an OWIN compatible web server.

You can run OWIN apps self-hosted on Mono/*nix. Here's my write-up for doing that on Heroku: http://friism.com/running-owin-katana-apps-on-heroku

I've heard Nowin runs well on Mono (haven't tried it yet myself). https://github.com/Bobris/Nowin

Miguel tweeted this a week ago:

NoWin, Nancy, SignalR & Lego on the raspberry pi:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_ZQtiupyzE

From the FAQ: https://github.com/owin/owin/wiki/faq - OWIN is inspired by rack, WSGI and node.js.

I'd say there are plenty of alternatives to OWIN (and the .Net stack) for *nix. That's probably why there's not much interest around Mono, too.

There is also Fos (FastCgi Owin Server) https://github.com/mzabani/Fos

Neat! It even almost works! http://i.imgur.com/f1HjoNW.png

SO close...

Looks like the Owin dependencies didn't come down - does NuGet run under MonoDevelop?

No, can't compile the add-in nor the cli program itself :(

NuGet.exe should run on Mono 3.2.x - http://nuget.org/nuget.exe

It may run but it won't compile. I'm no fan of Gentoo, but if it's open source I ought to be able to reproduce the binary with those sources.

Edit: An open source program must never depend on binaries in the build process where those binaries can't themselves be rebuilt from source. Again, I'm not a zealot but as a developer I see dependencies on arbitrary binaries as damage and try to work around them.

didn't know mvc5 was out. but i can tell you mvc4 with f# was nifty weeeee

(as nifty as mvc can possibly be anyway)

On [1], what does the underscore mean?

public SampleModule() { Get["/"] = _ => "Hello World!"; }

[1] http://nancyfx.org/

It's the 'Dynamic Dictionary' [0]. It's usually called 'parameters' but it's idiomatic in dotnet to name lambda input parameter '_' if don't use it in your expression.

[0] https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy/wiki/Taking-a-look-at-the-D...

As others have said, it's idiomatic to name a lambda param "_" if you're not using it.

To perhaps clarify a bit, here's what the Hello World example would look like if we added a second route that uses the lambda parameter, and a third route that does something else, and a fourth route that renders a view template.

  public SampleModule() { 
    Get["/"] = _ => "Hello World!"; 

    Get["/hello/{name}"] = p => ("Hello, " + p.name + "!");

    Get["/something-complicated"] = _ => {
      // complicated stuff happens here
      return "OK... we're all done";
    };

    // A variety of template engines are supported
    Get["/my-resume"] = _ => View["resume.cshtml"];
   
  }

Unused parameter for lambda function.

This is the most accurate reply. The expression

    Get["/"] = _ => "Hello World!";

is actually of the form a = b;

Where "a", i.e. "Get["/"]" is an array-like property (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2549tw02.aspx ) and the "b" value assigned to it is an anonymous function with one parameter, i.e.

    _ => "Hello World!"

In Nancy these handlers are of the type Func<dynamic, dynamic> ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb549151(v=vs.110).a... ) The parameter could be given any legal name, but an underscore is a convention meaning "I am not using this param".

It's dynamic path element.

    public SampleModule()
    {
        Get["/{id:int}"] = _ =>
        {
            int id = _.id;
            return "Parameter ID is: " + id.ToString();
        };
    }

Nancy is indeed an excellent framework, I use it for practically every web project at my day job these days.

How does Nancy stack up to ServiceStack?

servicestack is no longer free as far as I can tell, https://servicestack.net/pricing

Indeed, but for funded projects, their licensing is okay.