ASP.NET, OWIN and Katana

by Oliver 12. November 2014 13:42

This is a short overview post on OWIN, which (I quote from its homepage)

[…] defines a standard interface between .NET web servers and web applications. The goal of the OWIN interface is to decouple server and application, encourage the development of simple modules for .NET web development, and, by being an open standard, stimulate the open source ecosystem of .NET web development tools.

In other words, the OWIN specification aims to put an end to monolithic solutions like ASP.NET WebForms or even ASP.NET MVC in favor of creating smaller, more lightweight application components that can be chained together to configure an application that does exactly what the author intends it to do – and nothing more. In addition, OWIN simplifies development of alternative web servers that can substitute IIS, e.g. Nowin, or Helios, a promising .NET server alternative on top of IIS but without the heavy, 15-year old System.Web monolith (here's a good review of Helios by Rick Strahl).

Katana is a Microsoft project that contains OWIN-compatible components…

[…] for building and hosting OWIN-based web applications.

For an overview of Katana look here. The Katana architecture can be found on the right and promotes exchangeability of components on each layer. It turns out that ASP.NET vNEXT (github repo here) continues the work that has been done by Microsoft in that direction. Here's an enlightening quote by David Fowler, development lead on the ASP.NET team:

vNext is the successor to Katana (which is why they look so similar). Katana was the beginning of the break away from System.Web and to more modular components for the web stack. You can see vNext as a continuation of that work but going much further (new CLR, new Project System, new http abstractions).

The future of ASP.NET looks bright – especially for developers!

Check out my last post on ASP.NET vNEXT and Docker, too.

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About Oliver

shades-of-orange.com code blog logo I build web applications using ASP.NET and have a passion for javascript. Enjoy MVC 4 and Orchard CMS, and I do TDD whenever I can. I like clean code. Love to spend time with my wife and our children. My profile on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

About Anton

shades-of-orange.com code blog logo I'm a software developer at teamaton. I code in C# and work with MVC, Orchard, SpecFlow, Coypu and NHibernate. I enjoy beach volleyball, board games and Coke.