In Part 1, Building a website. The basics., we built the landing page for a local car dealership. By the end of Chapter 1, Static HTML – Designing the landing page., we had a nice home page which displayed a list of Vehicles. And we could search by vehicle category (Cars, Trucks, or Jeeps) using the Category buttons on the left side of the screen.
We also created a details page for the first car result. And set up a navigation link from the first car result to the car 1 details page. Then we made the header text a link back to the main landing page.
In the following sections I’m going to talk about some ways to improve the process we went through in Chapter 1.
Static HTML – What’s the problem?
Well we certainly learned a lot about HTML in Part 1, Chapter 1 by building out the landing page and one details page. But we did it all using Static HTML and painstakingly creating every detail by hand.
Also, imagine we were to finish out the site and had to build every details page by hand. What if more vehicles were then added in the future? We would have to again painstakingly add the new vehicle to the landing page, create a details page for it, and create a navigation link from the new vehicle on the home page to its details page.
Furthermore, if there was ever a change to the header or the footer we would have to make that change on the landing page and every details page. Who wants to do that? That’s what we call a maintenance nightmare.
So what are the alternatives if any? Well, let’s take a look in the following section.
Dynamic Frameworks
To solve these problems, we are going to start learning about Dynamic Frameworks, starting with ASP.Net Core.
Part 2 will be devoted to learning all about ASP.Net Core which is a server-side platform for creating dynamic websites.
Later parts of the book will also talk about client-side dynamic frameworks such as Angular but for the purpose of showing how they work together with ASP.Net Core which is first and foremost what this book is really all about as noted in the book’s title: “Beginning Web Development with ASP.Net Core & Client-Side Technologies”.
Dynamic Frameworks vs Dynamic Websites
Ok, so what is a dynamic framework and what is a dynamic website?
Dynamic Website
Well, a dynamic website, instead of laying out all of our data statically by hand with HTML like we did in Part 1, gets all of its data from a database and renders it in HTML via templates, layouts, and other features of the dynamic platform, framework, programming language, or some mix of these we are using in our technology stack.
Dynamic Framework
A dynamic framework, such as ASP.Net Core is the tool we use to create a dynamic website. For instance we can set up a template to display a details page. So whenever an administrator enters a new vehicle into the database, the details page given the id of the vehicle can fetch that vehicle’s data from the database and dynamically display itself for that vehicle using the details page template and the vehicle’s data from the database.
What’s Next
In this module we summed up some of the problems we are left with from Part 1, Chapter 1 and started to talk about some of the things we can do to help us moving forward.
In this chapter we are going to learn about ASP.Net Core; What it is and what it can do. But first we should put ASP.Net Core into more context. You see ASP.Net Core is really a subset of the .Net Platform for developing Web Applications. In the next module we will sum up what exactly .Net is and what it’s all about.