Current status of Upshot.js

Question

I am thinking of using upshot.js along with Knockout in one of my very important projects. I do not see any documentation or any activity around upshot. Before I commit to this decision, is this project still active?

If the entire asp.net stack is now open and one can see what is getting committed to repository, why this small library is still not on codeplex or github for community to see?

I hope this is still on radar of asp.net team.

Answer 1

Accodding to what is said on the discussions(see http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/discussions/topics/5321/asp-net-single-page-application) on SPA, the whole SPA strategy would change, so I think the final version o SPA or whatever will replace it will be quite different from the actual bits...so I don't know if it is a good move continuing using the actual version...that at my bets knowledge is not compatible with Mvc 4 RTM. I am the author of the Mvc Controls Toolkit there we implemented some js functions to help querying OData, and to update entitiess that are on the client side. They handle validation errors(both client side and server side), return to client principal keys created on the server, do changes tracking (to send to the server just changed entities) and allows undoing changes done on the client side. They handle also one to many relations. Moreover, updates are handled not only with WebApi controllers but also with normal controllers. Give a look to this first tutorial: http://dotnet-programming.com/post/2012/04/03/Mvc-Controls-Toolkit-Support-to-Mvc4-WebApi.aspx and then refer to the other tutorilas linked.

Answer 2

The ASP.NET team haven't finished the official release of ASP.NET SPA in time to ship with the final ASP.NET MVC 4 release but they are still working on it.

You can find the source code for ASP.NET SPA and follow the development effort on the ASP.NET CodePlex site:

• ASP.NET SPA Source Code (to look at the upshot stuff click Browse and expand src/SPA/upshot
• ASP.NET SPA Discussions

The general lack of documentation is caused by the fact that there haven't be an official release yet.

Answer 3

Upshot is officially dead.

"Earlier this year the Beta version of Visual Studio 2012 included a template that was designed for building “single page applications” using Upshot.js and a special Web API-based DataController that provided support for insert, update, and delete operations using the unit of work pattern with transaction support. We are not currently continuing work on that template or Upshot.js. We want to first focus on improving the development experience with existing popular JavaScript libraries and in future versions we will revisit this decision and see if additional libraries are needed to round out the SPA experience."

http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Roadmap

Answer 4

Give a shot to JayData at http://jaydata.org, it has JavaScript Language Query and JavaScript CRUD capabilities with change tracking, batches and a lot more. What it offers over BreezeJS is its provider agnostic architecture and a number of providers that you can use out of the box: OData, webSQL, IndexedDB, localStore, Facebook and YQL.

JayData plays nicely with NodeJS and let you consume OData from a JavaScript based middletier.

Also you can use JayData not only to consume but also to provide OData if you are using it on the server side with NodeJS and mongoDB.

Answer 5

According to this blog post, Upshot is officially dead: http://www.riaservicesblog.net/Blog/post/WCF-RIA-Services-is-Dead-Long-Live-WCF-RIA-Services.aspx

The author points to BreezeJS as an alternative: http://www.breezejs.com

Answer 6

Speaking for my company - we used exactly the same combination (Knockout + Upshot) and after sweating a lot of blood, we decided to get rid of Upshot and replace it with JQuery's ajax calls. Much more transparent and much more bugfree. However, much more code, too.

Back in February the authors of Upshot promised they would put documentation on in a week or so and since then I've heard nothing of them. If you want my opinion, I think this project has already been buried or indefinitely postponed.