To Spark or not to Spark?

Question

Been on a huge learning binge with ASP.MVC 2 lately, and recently uncovered there are different rendering engines out there... Spark especially caught my attention, couple of th

Answer 1

I know this question has been answered and was asked before Razor came out, but I would choose Razor if I were starting a new project. I have a current project with Spark and I definitely agree that it was a better choice over WebForms. But since the landscape has changed I would choose something else if I had to make the decision today.

Reasons

• The main developer of Spark was hired by Microsoft(probably working on Razor)
• The last stable build for Spark as of today has almost been one year.
• The syntax is fairly similar
• Outlining support. When creating web-pages it is critical for me to be able to collapse sections of html, Razor supports this and Spark does not.

I don't buy the argument that Razor has it's priorities wrong. They say Razor's default is code and then some markup and Spark is the opposite. I agree with that argument to a limited extent; the tools are there for both view engines to either have a code-less or code-ful view. It's up to the guy who ends up typing it out.