When you need to start a new solution, there are a lot of questions you need to ask yourself, and you should spend a lot of time before starting to write your very first business code.
Even creating an almost-empty solution is challenging;
ABP provides a well-architected, layered and production-ready startup solution based on the Domain Driven Design principles. The solution also includes a pre-configured unit and integration test projects for each layer.
Which libraries should you use to implement common requirements? The software development ecosystem is highly dynamic, making it challenging to keep up with the latest tools, libraries, trends, and approaches.
ABP pre-integrates popular, mature, and up-to-date libraries into the solution. You don't need to spend time integrating them or making them communicate with each other. They work properly out of the box.
When addressing UI concerns, a range of challenges surfaces. These include establishing the groundwork for a responsive, contemporary, and adaptable UI kit with a consistent appearance and a host of features like navigation menus, headers, toolbars, footers, widgets, and more.
Even if you opt for a pre-designed theme, seamlessly integrating it into your project could demand days of development. An additional hurdle lies in upgrading such themes. Frequently, the theme's HTML/CSS structure becomes intertwined with your UI code, rendering future theme changes or upgrades intricate tasks. This interweaving of code and design complicates the flexibility of making adjustments down the line.
ABP offers a distinctive theming system that liberates your UI code from theme constraints. Themes exist in isolation, packaged as NuGet or NPM packages, making theme installation or upgrades a matter of minutes. While you retain the option to develop your custom theme or integrate an existing one, ABP presents a collection of polished and contemporary themes.
Additionally, there are UI component providers like Telerik and DevExpress. However, these providers primarily furnish individual components, placing the onus on you to establish your layout system. When working within ABP-based projects, you can seamlessly incorporate these libraries, similar to how you would in any other project.
Establishing a robust testing environment is a time-consuming endeavor. It involves setting up dedicated test projects within your solution, carefully selecting the necessary tools, creating service and database mocks, crafting essential base classes and utility services to minimize redundant code across tests, and addressing various related tasks.
ABP Startup Templates arrive pre-equipped with configured test projects, streamlining the process for you. This means that from day one, you can readily commence writing your initial unit or integration test code without delay.
After you've set up the solution for development, you usually have to teach the developers how the system works and how to build it using the same agreed-upon methods. Even if you give them training, keeping the documentation up-to-date can be difficult. As time goes on, each developer might write code in their own way, causing the rules for writing code to become different from each other.
The ABP solution is already neatly organized and has clear explanations. Step-by-step tutorials and guides show you exactly how to work on an ABP project.
After you start your development, you must keep track of the new versions of the libraries you use for upgrades & patches.
We regularly update all packages to the latest versions and test them before the stable release. When you update your ABP based project, all its dependencies are upgraded to edge technology.
Abp update CLI command automatically discovers and upgrades all ABP-dependant NuGet and NPM packages in a solution. With ABP, it is easier to stay with the latest versions.
Creating a base solution takes significant time and requires good architectural experience. However, this is just the beginning! As you start developing, you will likely have to write lots of repetitive code; that would be great if all this could be handled automatically.
ABP automates and simplifies repeating code as much as possible by following the convention over configuration principle. However, it doesn't restrict you when you need to switch to manual gear. The control is always in your hands.
Single Sign On, Active Directory / LDAP Integration, OpenIddict integration, social logins, two-factor authentication, forgot/reset password, email activation, new user registration, password complexity control, locking account on failed attempts, showing failed login attempts... etc. We know that all these generic requirements are familiar to you. You are not alone!
ABP provide all these standard stuff pre-implemented for you as a re-usable account module. You just enable and configure what you need.
Cross-Cutting Concerns are the fundamental repeating logic that should be implemented for each use case. Some examples;
ABP automates or simplifies all the common cross-cutting concerns. You only write code that matters for your business, and ABP handles the rest by conventions.
You typically need to build infrastructure to implement your architecture properly. For example, you generally implement the Repository pattern. You define some base classes to simplify and standardize to create entities, services, controllers and other objects.
ABP provides all these and more out of the box. It is mature and well-documented.
There are a lot of requirements you repeatedly implement in every business application;
ABP provides an infrastructure to implement such requirements easily. Again, you don't spend your valuable time to re-implement all these again and again.
You will build many similar pages in a typical web application. Most of them will perform similar CRUD operations. It is very tedious and also error-prone to repeatedly create such pages.
ABP Suite can generate a full-stack CRUD page for your entities in seconds. The generated code is layered and clean. All the standard validation and authorization requirements are implemented. Plus, unit test classes are generated. Once you get a fully running page, you can modify it according to your business requirements.
Most libraries are designed as low level, and you typically do some work to integrate them properly without repeating the same integration and configuration code everywhere in your solution. For example, assume you must use RabbitMQ to implement your distributed event bus. All you want to do is; send a message to a queue and handle the incoming messages. But you need to understand messaging patterns, queues and exchange details. To write efficient code, you must create a pool to manage connections, clients and channels. You also must deal with exceptions, ACK messages, re-connecting to RabbitMQ on failures and more.
For example, ABP's RabbitMQ Distributed Event Bus integration abstracts all these details. You send and receive messages without the hustle and bustle. Do you need to write low-level code? No problem, you can always do that. ABP doesn't restrict you when you need to use low-level features of the library you are using.
All the infrastructure, even in the simplest way, takes a lot of time to build, maintain and document. It gets bigger over time, and it becomes hard to maintain it in your solution. Separating these into a re-usable project is the starting point for building your own internal framework.
Building, documenting, training and maintaining an internal framework is really hard. If you don't have an experienced, dedicated framework team, your internal framework rapidly becomes an undocumented legacy code that no one can understand and maintain anymore. On the other hand, these frameworks are generally developed by one or two developers in the team. And these fellows are becoming a knowledge silo. It is good for them but bad for the company because they are the project's single point of failure -SPOF-. Once they leave the company, the project dramatically goes down.
ABP is a community-driven, well-documented, mature and generic application framework. A team of highly experienced developers are working hard to keep it up-to-date, easy to understand and comfortable to use. Using such a stable framework makes you focus on your own business code and get help with the framework from experts whenever you need it.
SaaS applications, modular or microservice systems are most used enterprise software models. Building such systems not only requires a good understanding and experience but also requires a strong software infrastructure. Otherwise, you will find yourself spending a great effort to support these architectural details in your codebase.
Building a truly modular system is not easy! All the aspects of the system (database, entities, APIs, UI pages/components) can be split into modules, and each module can be re-usable without others. The plain ASP.NET Core doesn't provide such a modular architecture. If you need it, you should think about it from scratch.
The ABP is born to be a modular application development structure. Every feature in the framework is developed to be compatible with modularity. Documentation and guides explain how to develop re-usable modules in a standard way.
Multi-tenancy is a common way to implement SaaS systems. However, implementing a consistent multi-tenant infrastructure may become complicated.
ABP provides a complete multi-tenant infrastructure and abstract complexity from your business code. Your application code will be mostly multi-tenancy aware, while the ABP automatically isolates the database, cache and other details of the tenants from each other. It supports single database, per tenant database and hybrid approaches. It properly configures the libraries like Microsoft Identity and OpenIddict, which are not normally multi-tenancy compatible.
Building a microservice system requires many infrastructure details: Authenticating and authorizing applications and microservices and implementing asynchronous messaging and synchronous (Rest/GRPC) communication patterns between microservices are the most fundamental issues.
The ABP provides services, guides, and samples to help you implement your microservice solution using the industry standard tools.
ABP's commercial licenses even goes one step further and provides a complete startup template to kick-start your microservice solution.
All of us have similar but slightly different business requirements. However, we all should re-invent the wheel since no one's code can directly work in our solution. They are all embedded parts of a larger solution.
ABP modules provides a lot of re-usable application modules like payment, chat, file management, audit log reporting... etc. All of these modules are easily installed into your solution and directly work. We are constantly adding more modules.
All modules are designed as customizable for your business requirements. If you need complete control, you can download the full source code of any module and completely customize based on your specific business requirements.
Finally, Being in a big community where everyone follows similar coding styles and principles and shares a common infrastructure brings power when you have troubles or need help with design decisions. Since we write code similarly, we can help each other much better. ABP is a community-backed project with more than 10K stars on GitHub.
It is easy to share code or even re-usable libraries between ABP developers. A code snippet that works for you will also work for others. There are a lot of samples and tutorials that you can directly implement for your application.
When you hire a developer who worked before with the ABP architecture will immediately understand your solution and start development in a very short time.
