.NET Core and Sitefinity's Decoupled Architecture

In this Sitefinity Minute video, we are going to take a look at the new .NET Core renderer and see how it gives Sitefinity a truly decoupled experience with its three-tiered architecture approach. 

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Now viewing a diagram like this is really helpful because we can see all the components of Sitefinity and start to understand how they all work together.

So with prior Sitefinity versions, the components you have are the default Sitefinity rendering engine that's here, and what this does is it consumes data that you enter into the backend user interface. 

So there's also a native API and what this does is surfaces content and other data. So because all of these components are within one application, this application, the Sitefinity application, even if you are making a change to the frontend you're still going to need to build a single application and deploy all the components together as one. 

But over the years as Progress has been releasing newer versions of Sitefinity, they've been introducing new APIs.

First, let's talk about the Content API. So this was added to give Sitefinity headless capabilities. Now, this allowed content to be created in Sitefinity but then surfaced in other applications. 

So what really made .NET Core possible is this Page Meta Model API. Now, this API abstracts the page data and it allows other applications to understand the content and the structure of a page. And because of this API, it has allowed the separation of the frontend and the backend of the Sitefinity application. 

This separation changed the architecture of Sitefinity from a two-tier architecture to a three-tier architecture with tier one being the Sitefinity database, tier two being the Sitefinity CMS or site backend, and the third tier is the .NET Core renderer, which is outside of Sitefinity as it's own application. 

It's this separation of the backend and the frontend that makes the .NET Core renderer extremely beneficial and we'll discuss these benefits in our next video on Sitefinity .NET Core so stay tuned.

And that's the Sitefinity Minute.