A year of the super-duper-happy-path!

?To sum up, I would just kindly advice Andreas to invest his time and enthusiasm into something better, cause this Nancy was definitely born dead."

368 days ago I first announced Nancy here on Elegant Code and that was a piece of advice that I received among the many comments that followed.

You know what? Back them he might have been right. Nancy was a personal project that I spiked out in a couple of nights and let loose into the wild with no real expectations.

However, taking a step back an looking at the year that has passed, the complete opposite has unfolded . Since the first commit was made by me, on the 20th of November 2010, quite a lot have changed for Nancy. More than I could have possibly have imagined to be honest.

They grow up so fast

In the announcement post I wrapped up with a list of things I knew I wanted to get into Nancy at that time. Some of them were pretty big tasks, some quite small.

• A much richer request object
• The ability to inject dependencies into Nancy modules
• Conditions on actions
• View engine integration
• Ship with a nice bunch of response formatters
• Self-composed framework
• Request and Response interception
• NuGet presence
• Command line (powershell?) support for spawning up a Nancy application project
• Provide self-hosting somehow

Not only did we complete all of the above, but those are just the tip of the ice berg of things that?s happened during the last year. Today Nancy?s matured into an awesome framework for building web sites and services on both .net and Mono.

The list of features that are now supported is too long to list here, but a couple of highlights are support for all the major view engines, inversion of control containers, authentication, request pipelines (both on application and module level), model binding and so much more stuff that it blows my mind.

One thing that pleases me though, is that even with all the added features, Nancy is still a light weight framework because of the way it?s architecture. It?s built with a small core that has some nice extension points built into it. Extensions are built in the form of Nugets and to add a feature you simple grab the Nuget for it and of you go. Right now we have 20 official nugets and a couple of ones that?s been created by the community

Standing on a thousand shoulders

This is not the result of the labor of a single individual, quite the opposite.

Nancy a result of the amazing community that?s evolved around it and the incredible list of 57 people that have contributed over 100 pull requests and of course everybody that?s ever provided feedback, suggestion and that?s blogged, created screencast or talked about Nancy at a conference or other gatherings.

The project is a regular on the GitHub Languages page under the C# page, with 504 watchers and 132 forks at the time when I write this post. If you include the number of people that?s taken part in discussions on our user group and on Twitter.

Thank you so much!

A grumpy fella from the UK

Early one on guy from the UK took Nancy at heart and started contributing some pretty impressive stuff to the project. Right from the start he ?got Nancy? and understood the vision I had for the project. It didn?t take long (too long if you ask him) before it was only fair to add him as a core developer and get his name on the mailbox.

I am of course talking about Steven Robbins, a.k.a @grumpydev. Not only has he put a lot of awesome stuff into the project, but he?s also become a good friend over the year that?s passed.

Thanks for all your work on Nancy buddy!

Are we there yet?

Not by a long shot! We?ve got so much stuff planned for the project and there are so many suggestions and contributions coming in every week. However it is important that we pace out self and make sure things does not grown in an uncontrolled rate or direction. Every thing that is added into Nancy is still measured on the same scale as before. Controlled chaos as it?s best!

So here?s hoping for another awesome year!