Wednesday, August 26, 2015

App / Add-in model is dead?

Andrew Connell just released an interesting post, which mentioned:

"Customers already dismiss the add-in model... I don't see many people using it today. There's a lot of talk around it, but in reality, I bet Microsoft wouldn't want to admit how many people have built add-ins and deploy them to SharePoint Online in Office 365. Another model would be dismissed even quicker."

http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/developers-sharepoint-isn%E2%80%99t-a-platform-sharepoint-is-a-service

App / Add-in model is quite complicated at this stage. The development/troubleshooting productivity is poor. However, the idea is correct: we should keep development outside of SharePoint server.

No doubt, add-in mode on SharePoint 2016 will be much better. Then, more and more developers will start to utilize it. However, I do concern about the latency issue. Response from another (potentially quite far away remote) server, is always much slower than response from another process on the same server. What can we do to resolve this problem? Well infrastructure design and AJAX asynchronous calls help a lot, but no doubt, it could be headache.

So far, I haven't jumped to "App / Add-in model", because, no need. What I did, is to minimize the requirement of full trust solutions.

Sometimes we need to explain to clients that internal SharePoint sites don't need to look like internet facing asp.net sites; sometimes we need to use "windows task scheduler + PowerShell script" to replace timer job; sometimes we need "Content Editor Web Part + javascript + css" to replace web parts; etc.

Four years ago, 100% of the sites I created used full trust solutions; now, 5%

The whole farm is stable, the clients are happy, IT department colleagues are happy, and I am happy!

1 comment:

  1. I agree with your point of view. I joined a new organization 1 year ago and during my interview with the CIO, I told him that I make a point NOT to write code and deploy it on the server. Even if it requires users to bend their requirements. Not only does it make a stable environment, but it also cost effective. He liked my response.

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