ASP.NET WebForms was an attempt at encapsulating the lifecycle of separate components on page. It was widely reviled because that encapsulation stretched to the

ASP.NET WebForms was an attempt at encapsulating the lifecycle of separate components on page. It was widely reviled because that encapsulation stretched to the UI and gave you little or no control over your HTML output. Reuse was also hard, as adapting components to your model layer was often impossible (many of Microsoft's built-in components spoke directly to your database to get work done). It was also born a little too early to be built from the group up with Ajax in mind, and so maintained state with giant serialized blobs posted back to the server. I've lamented that this component-oriented approach was never revived or perfected (although Arc and Seaside both had continuation based approaches to page state, as I recall). Back then, of course, you'd get shouted at if your app didn't work with JavaScript turned off so you needed a solution on the server. It's now very interesting to see JS MVC frameworks framed in this way. I don't do much web stuff now, but I'd still like to hear more about approaches to reuse in these frameworks.