Current status

2009-10-19: Plain now supports ASP.Net MVC. Check out the new demo project!

2009-08-02: We have been strugling to make plain work on Mono. The problem has not just been the xaml parser. It has also been problems with getting basic .net 3.5 working on mono. We are at a point where we will focus elsewhere until mono and monodevelop are more stabile. At this point we have exchanged xaml with castle winsor.

In the near future we will focus on exceptions, indexing and recruiting folks to do Plain.Workflow and Plain.Forms

2009-04-22: Trying to make it run on mono. The big issue is the xaml parser we need

2009-04-20: At the moment we are stabilizing the project, making it ready for public use.

About

Utilizes the features of the .net framework to make a framework that provides low dependencies but high productivity.

The key word for this framework is 'plain'. It has to be plain and simple. Plain was not designed for its rich feature set or performance. Plain was designed to be simple. It's an experiment to find the boundaries of the .net platform and to see how clean and useful a .net framework can be. (not saying other frameworks are not, this is just our goal)

Most developers worst nightmare is to do things over more than one time. I mean, this is what computers are good at, not people. This is why one of the goals with Plain is to limit the number of repetitions made by users of the framework. Functionality should be written once and not duplicated in every layer.

Another focus has been to remove all the plumbing from ones code. Business applications is about business logic and user interaction. With Plain you can focus on your logic and to design your user interface. Trivial task like mapping data etc. are handled by Plain.

The diagram visualizes the goal of the plain framework. If you have very clear goals with your project, you can easily find a project platform that will be faster. The goal is to provide a platform that can be very predictable and supports mayor project changes.