The ASP.NET Code Behind Whitehouse.gov 143
An anonymous reader writes "The author looks at the markup for the new whitehouse.gov site, launched today. It uses ASP.NET and various JavaScript libraries. It suffers from various inefficiencies, most easily remedied. Check the images and techniques used to build the site front-end."
Is it Valid? (Score:2, Informative)
Unfortunately...
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2F&profile=css21&usermedium=all&warning=1&lang=en [w3.org]
Re:New robots.txt file (Score:2, Informative)
Obviously because of growth through the years. The same file in 2001 was pretty much empty [archive.org] as well.
Campaign servers ran open source (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/open-source-force-behind-obama-campaign [linuxjournal.com]
My take is that the whitehouse.gov servers are run by the government and have to conform to DoD security guidelines, which have only relatively recently included Linux configurations for certain commercial distributions such as Redhat. So they probably don't have the freedom to redo the servers with whatever they could cobble together with talented volunteers for the campaign.
Anyway, we'll eventually see whether all this talk of change only runs skin deep.
Re:I'm an ASP.NET developer... (Score:3, Informative)
First hit on Google. [devnewz.com] Remember to search only the "X-Aspnet-Version" (remove the quotes) part of that text. BTW, as efficiencies go, this is a pretty minor one. It matters for a site like whitehouse.gov because they're likely to get a few million visits per day. (At least in the short term.) Very few websites have that problem, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. :-)
What is this ignorance? (Score:5, Informative)
I just love when people who know nothing about ASP.NET attempt to critique things:
The whitehouse.gov site has long ASP.NET IDs. There are many elements on the page that have very long IDs, which are mainly a waste of bandwidth usually. They could be easily removed on the server side.
<a id="ctl09_rptNavigation_ctl00_rptNavigationItems_ctl01_hlSubNav"...
Sorry bud, they can't really be removed on the server side - these are controls embedded in controls embedded in controls. Maybe a slight shaving of rptNavigationItems down to rptNavItms or something, but the long name is to be able to reference the embedded controls.
Please try again...
Anyone try a DNS lookup? (Score:3, Informative)
$ host www.whitehouse.gov
www.whitehouse.gov is an alias for www.whitehouse.gov.edgekey.net.
www.whitehouse.gov.edgekey.net is an alias for e2561.b.akamaiedge.net.
Reducing their bandwidth and server load is just not a big deal. (See Akamai [wikipedia.org] and note that the whole site takes the path that the "image" request takes in that diagram.)
Re:Maybe we can (Score:5, Informative)
Whilst I'm a fan of PHP myself, I have to say the new ASP.NET MVC framework is rather good.
It really does beat hands down anything in the PHP world in terms of how quickly you can get something up whilst maintaining quality. I'd argue partly this is because of the Visual Studio integration and the power of Visual Studio to start with.
I wouldn't ever build a live app. in web forms, but I could be pretty tempted with the new MVC framework I have to admit. The various PHP frameworks out there that perform a similar task such as CakePHP could learn a lot from it in terms of how quickly you can build with it without the usual sacrifice of quality of software you get with Microsoft's tools (again, web forms for example).
Of course, the thing is as well, the Microsoft platform is slowly getting better, Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 really aren't that bad, performance isn't too much different to Apache/PHP now and security since .NET is much improved. Of course, Apache was always pretty good so to say IIS is improving doesn't mean much in that context but certainly combined with .NET MVC I think the whole LAMP platform needs to watch out. The various PHP frameworks like Cake could do things such as dropping the stupid cake bake crap that fails half the time on Windows and is pretty much undocumented (It has one page in the docs that don't explain much beyond what it's for). In contrast Symfony is absolutely fantastic on documentation and so is Zend, but it's still much more hassle, and there's still many more security pitfalls you have to keep an eye on vs. ASP.NET MVC.
I'd probably like Java, but I've never used it professionally, only academically so can't compare with that. At the end of the day though, my point is that with ASP.NET MVC I can build a high quality site much more quickly and with much greater confidence than I can with any PHP framework right now.