Moving Toward a Decoupled CMS With .NET Core in Sitefinity

A fully decoupled CMS gives you the flexibility to build rich UIs with APIs plus the high-productivity layout engine delivered by .NET Core.

In this article, I want to give you a preview of our vision of how Sitefinity can be used to rapidly develop and deliver multichannel experiences utilizing .NET Core MVC.

Why ASP.NET Core?

ASP.NET is a popular web-development framework for building web apps on the .NET platform. .NET Core is the open-source version of ASP.NET, that runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows. .NET Core was first released in 2016 and is a re-design of earlier Windows-only versions of ASP.NET.

It enables developers to deliver APIs quickly, has tools to simplify development processes and we plan to add it to Sitefinity.

Sitefinity Today

Let’s look at today’s Sitefinity. It’s a powerful, traditional CMS with headless capabilities:

To give you the best of all worlds—the traditional plus the powerful REST APIs—we’ll decouple the frontend and move it to .NET Core enabling it to communicate with those powerful APIs.

Our Strategy

Sitefinity hosting architecture today is based on two tiers. Tier 1 hosts database services. Tier 2 hosts the backend services, which serve backend content editing requests, and the page rendering engine, which serves the requests of the frontend user.

We envision moving to a three-tier architecture, where Tiers 2 and 3 communicate with one another via REST:

The benefits of a three-tier architecture:

• Faster development—Customize the frontend without having to deal with the backend
• Easier upgrades—All customizations will be isolated, so the backend services can be upgraded quickly
• Isolation between website and administration—Increases system security and reliability
• Extensibility for other rendering engines and IDE—With the frontend application based on .NET Core, IT administrators can host the app on any platform supported by .NET Core.
• Less expensive scalability—The frontend application will be much smaller and lightweight, requiring fewer resources to run. When you scale, you can use less powerful machines.

In practical terms, imagine that you need to change a widget. In a two-tier architecture, since the backend and frontend are running in the same process, you need to restart the entire system and wait for reinitialization.

In a three-tier scenario, when you deploy or run the application to see the outcome, you only need to restart the frontend. The backend processes stay up and running throughout.

Scalability Benefits

In a two-tier architecture, if you’re experiencing a heavy user load and you must scale, you need to duplicate the application on the next node you want to add. That means scaling the front and backend because they live in the same application.

In three tiers, you have different applications hosted on separate environments, meaning you can scale only what you need, when you need it.

Next Steps – Additional Refinements

The next steps we envision toward decoupled rendering include:

• ASP.NET Core widget development framework
• Out-of-the box widget designers based on Angular 2
• .NET Core-powered renderer and page editor
• A page layout REST API
• Backend customization implemented as microservices

Stay tuned as we launch these exciting new improvements across coming Sitefinity releases! For more on Sitefinity click the link below, or feel free to dig right into our documentation.

Learn More about Sitefinity