OWIN and Katana, why decouple the application from the server?

Question

I dont quite get this.. sure its cool to be able to self-host an application and it might be nice since if the IIS goes down for any reason... then all your sites goes down.. bu

Answer 1

A OWIN and Katana overview from MS provides -- historical background and reasoning behind both projects can be found here:

http://www.asp.net/aspnet/overview/owin-and-katana/an-overview-of-project-katana

To summarize from the article:

OWIN: Its goal is not to be the next Web framework, but rather a specification for how Web frameworks and Web servers interact.

Project Katana: The Katana project represents the set of OWIN components that, while still open source, are built and released by Microsoft. These components include both infrastructure components, such as hosts and servers, as well as functional components, such as authentication components and bindings to frameworks such as SignalR and ASP.NET Web API. Katana brings many of the benefits of Node.js (and frameworks like it) -- the simplicity with which one could author and run a Web server -- without forcing the developer to throw out everything she knows about developing ASP.NET Web applications.