Gojko Adzic

Last month, I took a short break from my computer and went on a holiday. When I came back I was surprised to find that, while I was on the beach, Google sent quite a few people looking for underground Korean adult movies to my web log. I don’t know what is so special about the Korean illegal film industry, but considering that they also eat dogs there, it must be something very interesting to watch. I guess that you can find anything on Internet these days, but why were they looking for it on my web site? The answer to that question turned out to be another great example of why inputs should be sanitised no matter how unimportant. Continue Reading »

One of the best things about Castle Monorail MVC engine is that it allows us to test controllers from the IDE, without actually deploying anything to the web server. A major problem with most web development environments, including classic ASP.NET, is that the workflow and session logic can only be tested through the UI. User interface testing is slow, pain to maintain and generally does not pay off as much as code unit tests do. Monorail’s programming model allows us to test workflow and session logic from the code, leaving only the actual rendering outside the reach of unit tests. That is how Monorail empowers us to really apply agile principles to web development, and saves us even more time and effort. Continue Reading »

In the third part of the Castle tutorial, we look into the features of Monorail that allow us to save a lot of time and effort when developing web applications. We explore advanced Monorail concepts that help us delegate error processing and authentication to the framework and reuse templates. We also look into how Monorail integrates nicely with ActiveRecord to automatically load and modify database objects based on HTML forms. Continue Reading »

Castle project is a great .NET enterprise application framework. It helps us develop .NET applications and web sites by providing the plumbing and making it easy to test the most important parts of the system. I’ve decided to build a demo application with the Castle project for an internal training session, to show how easy it is to work with this framework and to demonstrate the best practices. I will post the tutorial in parts on this web site as I develop it. In the first post, we work on the object-relational mapping with ActiveRecord and write unit tests for the database mapping layer. Continue Reading »

HTTP Sessions allow us to develop web applications as if they were running on a desktop machine, making the web so much more useful. Although HTTP is a stateless protocol and there is a lot of work involved in providing this abstraction, web servers make it very easy to use — perhaps too easy. Taking a quote from Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility. That is why misusing HTTP sessions is probably the number one obstacle to building scalable web sites today. Here are some tips how to consume HTTP sessions responsibly. Continue Reading »