Questions about XAF

Hi Preetham,
Thank you for your interest in our technologies. We appreciate this greatly.
>>Can you tell me if XAF gives us the flexibility to design and come up with our own UI?
Sure, XAF provides great customization capabilities for developers. It is possible to substitute almost every UI element and even integrate fully custom forms and user controls. The How much of XAF's default UI is customizable. article provides more information on this.
>> Can we apply custom CSS?
Sure, it is possible to customize default web templates and web controls used in our framework. In order to do this, you should follow standard customization approaches for ASP.NET. You may also want to review the http://documentation.devexpress.com/#AspNet/CustomDocument4100 help topic to learn more about some specifics with regard to the DevExpress ASP.NET components.
>>
I am trying to build a mini-social networking website, that has good UI (built with CSS), ties in to Facebook to login, and has lots of images and videos. It will also have Blogging and Forum Module.
Do you recommend XAF for such an application? How about SEO? Friendly URL's, URL Routing etc?
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In my opinion, XAF is not good for the application you plan. If you look at typical applications XAF produces, you will see that you will have to invest a lot of resources in designing custom UI screens to replicate a typical social networking website.
XAF is more intended for data-centric business applications, which, for instance will be used in intranet. Though, I know a few examples of public web sites, built with XAF.
However, I believe that XAF will be very good as an administrative part of your web site. I mean a tool, allowing you to manage web site content. I know that a lot of our customers utilize XAF this way.
As for the main part of your public web site, I suggest you use our ASP.NET components and XPO as a data layer. In my opinion, it is a killer combination, because you can build your business logic within a library and then reuse it in other applications. For example, although our main web site is built with the help of XPO and our ASP.NET components, we also have several XAF ASP.NET applications used to manage the contents of our web site. We also have several Windows Forms front ends (bug tracking, customers & sales, support, analytics, etc), based on the same library of persistent classes.
Please let me know if I can help you further.
Thanks,
Dennis

Hi Dennis,
I have been trying XAF for the past couple of weeks and I love it… I think XAF will be very helpful in managing the administrative aspects of a website. In your previous reply, you mentioned that you were aware of some public facing XAF applications… Can you post a link… I just want to see how XAF was used?
Also, I have been reading about Domain Components and it's such a powerful feature of XAF… My only concern is can we use these domain components in other UI? I've read a blog post by Gary Short that support of Pure XPO is not yet provided for Domain Components… Do you know how long it's going to take?
For now, I am fine with using XAF and XPO.

Hello,
Thank you for your reply. I am glad to hear that you liked our products. As for an example of a public XAF web site, I recently answered a similar question at Sample website(s) implemended with XAF.
Regarding your concern, could you please clarify what you mean by "in other UI"? At the moment, DC can be used only within XAF applications.
As for mixing DC and pure XPO business classes, it is already possible to some extent, but of course this can be improved. We hope to overcome all the possible problems by the time DC is officially released.
Please let me know if I can help you further.
Thanks,
Dennis