This web site is an experiment with a custom web technology that is meant as a bit of fun and an intellectual challenge. It came about after I learnt how to use ASP.NET and came away feeling somewhat disappointed. If you are interested in any of the ideas mentioned in the web site, please feel free to contact me. My name is Robin Soole and you can use this e-mail address.

As a background, I liked the ASP.NET ideal (to have a server side web technology that you could program entirely using an advanced compiled language (C#)). The big disappointment was the clunky page load cycle that Microsoft used to render and communicate with the client side. While I know that a lot of these deficiencies have been eliminated over time, I could not draw myself away from my own creations once I started building them!

So, to cut a very long story short, I set about inventing a new web technology that uses ASP.NET (C#) on the server size and an advanced AJAX library on the client side. The original library I used was a pure JavaScript library called Dojo. However I found JavaScript to be a truly awful language to work with. I later discovered Google Web Toolkits, which allowed me to develop the client side technologies in compiled, strongly typed Java and this was then automatically built into JavaScript which could run in any browser efficiently. The whole architecture is a brilliant idea. The only thing that would beat this, as far an I am concerned, is a compiled, strongly typed, pure JavaScript language (which does not exist as far as I know).

This web site is all about building MVP applications, where the business logic (M + P) stays on the server and the view (V) stays on the client side.

You will find the web apps currently available by following this link here and anyone can use them.

https://www.navwin.com/webapps.aspx

For reasons that are explained on the next link, it is recommended that you access the web apps by using a browser bookmark.

https://www.navwin.com/Topics/WebAppHelpSSLPortal/WebAppHelpSSLPortal.aspx

All the web content is written in Word For Windows 2010 and then converted into an ASP.NET web site using an in-house application (very simple idea; write the web pages as normal Word documents and then use Office Automation to save them in HTML format). This way you get all the benefits of Word spell check, embedded pictures and document formatting and then you can convert the whole lot to standard HTML with a simple button click.

The web applications are written in the MVP style. NavWin MVP uses Google Web Toolkits (GWT) on the client side and ASP.NET (C#) on the server side. If you want to find out how to do this, then some of the key ideas are described in this web site.