Tinkering with Agility: Honorable Mentions

In the process of researching Agility I needed to throw together a quick serverside stack to accept the RESTful calls from Agility. I went with my current framework de jour Tinyweb and I must admit it was a great call. For more basic info on Tinyweb check out my blog post

Agility by default routes the RESTful requests to api/model/{id} and Tinyweb let me create a handler associated with this sort of url by way of areas.

Areas --

Tinyweb has a feature I wasn;t aware of before. It is possible to register a handlers namespace as an "area" (if you have experience with ASP.NET MVC you'll know what that means).

Tinyweb.Areas.Add("Agility.Tinkerings.Web.Handlers.Api", "api");

This means that even though my handler is call TodoHandler the url would map to the one above without having to sacrifice naming style of the handler or force us to create a custom route variable in each handler that had to map to this area. Flippin clever stuff

WebActivator

Another excellent Nuget package is the WebActivator and I have been charmed by it's slickness recently. WebActivator allows you to attribute a class/namespace and specify what code should be run when the application starts. So rather than having to put in a load of lines for configuring different aspects of your stack into Global.asax.cs you can break them into distinct classes and avoid breaking SRP more than you have too. Here is the example I used in the Agility.js source

[assembly: WebActivator.PostApplicationStartMethod(typeof(TinywebActivator), "Activate")]
namespace Agility.Tinkerings.Web.Activators
{
    public class TinywebActivator
    {
        public static void Activate()
        {
            Tinyweb.Areas.Add("Agility.Tinkerings.Web.Handlers.Api", "api");
            Tinyweb.Init();
        }
    }
}

I don't even have a Global.asax defined at all.

Feel free to poke around the source to get a better picture of how I threw the backend together. Thanks go to Tinyweb and @martinrue