Introduction

eDemonOnline is a set of class libraries, web control libraries, tools and utilities all written in the C# programming language targeting the .NET 2.0 framework. The project is divided into three main groups of components and sub-projects: Base Components, Web Packages/Modules, and Site Integration and Development Components. Each of these component groups targets a different set of users, the base components group targets web developers on the foundation level, the web modules group targets webmasters and web developers who want off-the-shelf components to integrate into their sites, and finally, the site integration and development components group targets end-users with minimal experience with web development. For details on the different groups of components, please refer to the project structure section below. The work on the project will be going incrementally in the direction from base components to site integration components. That means, the development will start at the first component group and go through the other two groups chronologically.

History

When you work in web design and programming for some time, you know how hard an frustrating that can be. Integration between the different components and technologies used in web design has been changing so rapidly and it has been a time and effort consuming process compared to desktop development until recently. This project is a simple try to introduce some ease to the life of a web developer working on ASP .NET platforms. Like any project, at first, it is very hopeful, even dreamy, but then things eventually mature and the goals of the project goes from broad general to specific, more achievable goals. That's exactly what happened with this project! At first, the project goals where written in a generic, literature-style way, which made things seem impossible to achieve. Slowly, they project was divided into smaller tasks and sub projects, and eventually, these tasks are now being taken one at a time. That's why the project description and documentation changed.

Project Structure

NOTE: We will try to summarize the structure of this project in this section. However, we will be providing more detailed information about each component during the development process.

As mentioned above, the project will be divided into three major groups of components and sub-projects. These groups indicate the targeted audience of each one, and the level of complexity of the components involved. The three groups are:

1. Base Components Group (BCG)
2. Web Modules/Packages Group (WMPG)
3. Site Integration and Development Tools (SIDT)

Following is a brief description of each of these groups and its included components

1. Base Components Group (BCG)

This group targets the experienced developers using .NET framework for web development. It provides these developers with a set of base class libraries, web controls and utilities to help them do their every day work in an easier way. The work on this group is divided into many main tasks (corresponding to sub-projects and libraries). The following list is not complete, but it will mature with time, i hope

PHP .NET

The PHP.NET sub-project is an ambitious project aiming at porting the vast function library of the well-known PHP language to the .NET framework. While developing this project, we will try to keep the naming convention used in php as much as humanly possible so that PHP developers will feel less out of place. However, PHP is not a fully-object-oriented language so some trade-offs had to be made. The project outcome will be a set of class library assemblies containing mainly classes with static member methods that mimics the different PHP functions and function libraries (usually, each PHP function library will be represented by one static class)

Web Controls Base Library

The web controls base library (WCBL) group is a set of ready ASP .NET off-the-shelf controls to enhance the visual experience provided by .NET based websites. The controls can be used by developers simply to add some visual enhancements to their projects or to develop other, more complex components. Also, some of the controls are merely visual enhancements to existing controls (such as the ComboBox control ) while some are new controls that are not available in the standard .NET framework (such as the DatePicker control). The configuration of these controls will vary from simply changing their properties in the IDE of choice to writing XML config files or setting user rights, database table names, etc...(for example, the ImagePicker control requires you to configure the source of the images to display as options to the user)

eDemonsServBase

The eDemonServBase (eDemons Services Base Library) is a set of advanced classes that are useful for service-based applications. It can be sued to develop web/windows services much more easier.

eDemonsWebHelpers

eDemonsWebHelpers is a set of visual desktop tools to help web developers do a group of tasks ranging from simple values lookup to code generation.

2. Web Modules/Packages Group (WMPG)

This group of components can be used both by advanced and beginner developers to provide off-the-shelf components to a website. The group contains libraries and source code along with SQL generation scripts to enable the user to have the desired module running on his/her server using little configurations. It also includes documentations on the different situations and alternatives of deployments available for the module (for example, we might provide more than one implementation for the Forums web module, one that stores data in XML files, another that stores data in SQL servers and yet another that stores the data in HTML files. The user must choose his most appropriate method and execute the deployment steps necessary by reading the documentation on the Forums module)

3. Site Integration and Development Tools (SIDT)

This is an ambitious end goal to provide the users (developers and end users alike) with an IDE to use the full scale features of the project. However, talking about this group is early in this stage of development