OpenRasta

OpenRasta is a development framework targeting the Microsoft .NET platform for building web-based applications and services, and distributed under an Open-Source MIT License.

By focusing development around resources and HTTP methods,^[1] OpenRasta simplifies the creation of ReST-friendly interfaces.

Developed to respect modern development practices, coming prepackaged with an inversion of control container, and enforcing the use of dependency injection throughout the framework, OpenRasta is a framework implementing an architectural pattern close to Model–View–Controller, called Resource–Codec–Handler.

OpenRasta also supports advanced HTTP features such as content negotiation, digest access authentication and full control of response codes sent back to a client.^[2]

Hosting of an application built on OpenRasta is available through ASP.NET, in-memory, in-process through Windows' HTTP APIs, or through any other environment able to receive HTTP requests, as the framework itself has no dependency on ASP.NET.

History

OpenRasta was first released as a preview on 6 December 2008.^[3]

It is branded with a 2.0 version because the first version was not made publicly available.

The 2.0 beta 1 release was made available in April 2009, providing HTML support, binders for model creation and support for HTML forms, as well as json, XML and webforms support.

The 2.0 beta 2 release was made available on 21 August 2009,^[4] and was the first version to be completely decoupled from the asp.net framework, as well as come packaged in a Windows installer format with Visual Studio 2008 integration.

The 2.0 Release Candidate expands on some of the features of beta 2 by having a pluggable type system, and provides many bug fixes over the previous release.

Adoption

Some companies, such as Huddle, have used OpenRasta since the first beta.^[5]

The framework has gained enough traction that Microsoft's Mix conference will host an OpenRasta session in 2010.^[6]

7digital have used Openrasta since 2010^[7]

References