.NET REST Frustrations

I've had a frustrating few days, and I'm going to vent about it a little bit here, because the experience has been something that I think many programmers have to deal with from time to time.

This weekend I found myself with 2 evenings home by myself, while my wife works her new 2nd shift job. While I miss having my evenings with her, part of me had been looking forward having some evenings all to myself, to really dig into some extra-curricular programming projects.

I'm in an unusual position right now. Unusual for myself anyway: I have a lot of ideas of things to work on. Some are for myself, and some are for work, to get a little extra satisfaction out of the job, and to make things more tolerable during the 9 to 5 when I'm on the hook for some less-than-enjoyable tasks. One thing most all of these ideas have in common is that they revolve around creating web services. Which is something I've never done before.

A few weeks back I wrote a meandering rumination, documenting my thoughts as I ventured into the web services world... Specifically, the REST world. I found myself leaning toward a particular approach, and this weekend I had an the time and opportunity to attempt to start down that road. Unfortunately, I hit some roadblocks. OpenRasta is just not going to work for me right now, I'm afraid. If I'm lucky that will change in the near future, but for now it's the state of things. So today I went back to the drawing board. Starting with whether I should persevere on the goal of using REST.

I didn't spend much time back at the very beginning here. I know that it is fairly easy to whip up an RPC-style web service with WCF. But I also know that RPC is (for most use cases) becoming a far less appropriate option. I've been doing a lot of reading on REST, and it is starting to make some fundamental sense to me. It's a paradigm I *want* to work in because it feels natural in so many ways. But I look at all the resources on REST in WCF and think to myself that it really just seems like a lot more work than it needs to be. Not to mention the fact that the whole point of WCF is to be protocol-agnostic, which is of course the opposite of REST, which embraces the HTTP protocol. Using WCF for REST seems like a frivolous waste of resources: a framework for its own sake, rather than for any value derived from the generality. So, I really wanted to avoid WCF for the learning curve and for the design conflict. But what are my other options?

I've read about how awesomely intuitive and simple the Sinatra framework is for REST, but I don't know Ruby, and really have zero comfort with Linux from a programming, admin, or server standpoint. So Sinatra really just has too many hurdles at this point. That's a lot of learning I'd have to do before I can make a simple hello world web service. Not sure I am willing to wait so long before I get some ROI. I'll learn Ruby properly, eventually. But preferably not when I'm also trying to learn 4 other things from scratch.

There are a couple of .NET frameworks around that claim to be heavily inspired by Sinatra. First there was Martin, and now Nancy. Unfortunately, I can't really find any recent activity on or around Martin. Maybe it was just a whim that didn't get the necessary care and investment.

Nancy looks more promising. It looks like a really nice start. I hope it will be a viable platform in the future, and I'll be keeping an eye on it. But right now it's brand new and not ready for production usage. Which puts it out of the running for all but my personal projects. It seems like a train I'd want to be on, and I'd love to contribute to the effort. But well, here I've got a couple more hurdles. Once again, I'm a web services n00b. I have my sense of design and elegance, and not much else. No real appreciation for the realities and complexities of the problem space or the underlying technologies. This is a journey I'm now looking to embark on for the first time. I'm far from ready to try blazing a trail for others. The second hurdle is that it's hosted on Github, and alas I'm still a Git n00b as well. I have successfully installed Git on one machine, and haven't actually successfully used it a single time yet.

What's left for REST? OpenRasta again. Which I've already established won't work. But why? It looks so... right. I can't just give up, can I? OpenRasta looks really nice in a lot of the same ways as Nancy, except that it's a far more mature product. And the author, Sebastien Lambla, has a ton of OSS experience. It's on Github too, like Nancy, but given a stable branch/build that shouldn't be a problem. But here's where things go bad. The stable binaries seem to have vanished from the place they are supposed to be, at ohloh.net. And the two ostensibly stable branches are currently in a state of... instability... as in they won't build. None of which contributes to a n00b-friendly situation. So here we are indeed back to the same obstacles I have with Nancy.

It's important for me to say that I don't begrudge Sebastien or his OSS compatriots for this situation. He's got a lot of irons in the fire with his OSS efforts, and a lot of people with more important complaints than mine are looking for their issues to be attended to. But it makes me sad, because this seemed like my best bet, and I feel like it's hanging there taunting me just outside my reach.

So... I'm coming out of the weekend very discouraged. I have all these things I want to do, and I feel like I'm being foiled at every turn by a combination of my own ignorance and unfortunate circumstance. My ideas are frozen until I can overcome some of these challenges, but right now I feel like I really need the motivation of progress on these ideas to propel me through the work of ramping up on... well, on anything. I have enough other things to do with my time that it's a challenge to prioritize learning new tech if I won't also be making progress toward producing something.

I feel like I have to make a choice between doing things the way I want and having to spend a long time digging through the muck of learning unfamiliar territory compounded with the pitfalls of immature tools, or I can compromise my design sense and go with WCF in the interest of making some material progress on my ideas.

At least WCF is a place to start where there is an established "on ramp" with controlled unknowns. I could get some preliminary, controlled exposure to the problem space and the technology stack while learning WCF, while still preserving a safety net of sorts, in the form of MS's mature and thorough framework support. Then once I have cleared those learning curves, I can revisit the question and do things the way I'd prefer to next time. So alas, that is probably what I will do.

It's just very discouraging to end up back at the place I started. The one place I didn't want to be. But that's life. Sometimes you can't fight the constraints. Sometimes you have to accept them and just do what you have to "ship", even if it means choosing a technology you'd rather not rely on.