Are there any worthy CSLA alternatives available?

Question

My company is interested in porting a large business application to .NET. We plan on developing a desktop version and a silverlight version. I mostly researched the CSLA framework (got rocky's book, halfway through already) and found it a bit over-engineered, the data layer side didn't seem so polished either.

Is there any other frameworks that claim to do what CSLA is doing? I'm not talking about ORM tools (e.g L2S, EF, NHibernate.) I'm interested in a framework that supports business rules, easy n-tier architecture, objects are domain driven and not database driven, security on the business objects etc...

I know I can find small frameworks that will do some of the work required (Enterprise Application Block comes to mind) but I'm looking for one that has everything included.

Impress

Answer 1

I would be interested in hearing more about why you think CSLA is over-engineered. I have found it to be very feature rich but most of the features just implement standard .NET framework interfaces and so all the plumbing comes free and you definately have to use it.

Your requirements seem to be a great fit for CSLA. Other frameworks (such as ORMs) contain validation/business rules but the major issue is that you are (in most cases) stuck with your data schema. This leads to objects that are not friendly for UI development and force you to know the intricacies of your database.

Magocsi

Agreed. It souinds like it has all the features you're looking for. Also, the classes you write end up fairly simple, the framework itself hides all the complexity (which I would think is a good thing). – Phenol

Answer 2

Here's a good blog post (archived version) courtesy of "Adam on the Net" discussing and comparing the following:

• Castle Project
• Spring.NET
• Enterprise Library
• CSLA

Betoken

The blog post is gone. – Phenol

Answer 3

If I were you I would either pick Spring.NET or just start building your own framework around ASP.NET MVC and Fluent NHibernate. Then slowly add your own building blocks as and when you need them. Enterprise library blocks are good but heavy according to me and have lot of things that you may not really need.

Biomass