Let me state it : Diavolo is ASP.NET WebForms. I know most people is now fond of MVC and that stuff but let me say I tried to use one of those stars lately, that is Orchard, to gain some knowledge about new kids on the block and, while I find it interesting, Orchard is very convoluted, like probably most of those projects. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it has lots of potential and lots of innovative things since it's probably one of the most interesting project which grew up lately, however WebForms is a different beast. Nothing currently matches its flexibility and, via WebControls and extensions, its ability to become anything and everything you want. Of course, there's some overhead in it but in my opinion it's worth the pain.

So how does Diavolo compare to new Web 2.0 stuff ? Well, I should say XHTML conformance wasn't my top priority as a start. I'm now focusing on ironing things together and then I will also focus con standards. I consider that an optimization rather than a mandatory things and since we didn't have our first release (which would probably be Diavolo v4.3), I'm not putting too much emphasis on XHTML conformance yet.

So what's in Diavolo now which relates to Web 2.0 ? First of all, I was really happy to be able to create a container which proved itself flexible enough to accomodate many different technologies. Diavolo currely is WebForms (never forget!) but supports new ASP.NET 4 routing for WebForms meaning you can create your stuff eliminating postbacks, if that's what you want, and relying on URL parameters. To make it easier, it has a very basic but flexible parameters engine which will automatically detect your parameters and make them available to your code without relying on parsing query strings. So when in your "news" module, you can rely on postbacks to display selected news or you could redirect to your "XXX/read/167" URL where read is your parameter to tell your module it needs to load a specific news and "167" is your news ID. That's similar to MVC actions / controllers though Diavolo is not MVC. You could also redirect to "XXXX/year/2011/month/10/" to list all news for October 2011 and so on. Whether you prefer to use postbacks or URL routing, that's up to you but that opens new possibilities for SEO lovers. And we all love SEO stuff..

Then you have MS AJAX Extensions and that means UpdatePanels, AJAX Control Toolkit and everything from MS AJAX arsenal. I agree MS AJAX Control Toolkit slowed development a lot lately but UpdatePanels are, in my opinion, great stuff. Plus, you can use UpdatePanels with other AJAX frameworks to provide AJAX development and newer stuff. I don't really know if AJAX CT will still be around in a year from now since it really seems things kind of halted, however a few extenders are very useful (validator callouts, for ex.) so it's very nice to have Diavolo support both UpdatePanels and AJAX Control Toolkit, even if you won't use them.

Then you have JQuery. I agree JQuery is where most AJAX development is happening and you will find lots (and I mean: lots!) of JQuery resources, scripts, widgets, plugins and so on. So for serious Web 2.0 development, we had to support JQuery and... I did it ! Diavolo fully supports JQuery and, best of all, it allows to mix and match jQuery and MS AJAX framework together. I love those cool JQuery UI dialogs opening on my pages and displaying UpdatePanels which will make it possible to add server-side code to handle your AJAX stuff directly in your page and that means events and so on. I also love the idea to be able to control my JQuery scripts right from code-behind by emitting my management scripts right from server-side code. That makes it possible not to have logic in your JS scripts and only care to manage things server-side. And you still have power of JQuery at your disposal and that means all the cool stuff you can find on the Web. JQuery is a must and we have it.

Finally, VisualWebGUI joined the camp. Let me say that being able to integrate so different technologies is really a proof of stability for Diavolo and a proof of flexibility as well. VWG is king for AJAX development and it makes difficult tasks very to handle. Kind of Web the way it should have been since the start. Most administrative tasks in Diavolo will be handled by VisualWebGUI and they are being rewritten right now (for example, Dashboard management is know a VWG module) and it's so cool to be able to control JQuery right from VWG.

So here you go: WebForms, SEO-friendly routing, JQuery and VisualWebGUI... what would you ask more for Web development ?