Motivation for OWIN

Question

These days I read about OWIN on the MSDN website but I still can’t find a good motivation for it. What I read is that OWIN is a way to uncouple the server application so we can swap the server if needed without affecting the application.

So far so good, but I can’t see that as a very strong motivation. For example, in all the projects I’ve worked on and even what I’m working on now, I can’t see any reason to change from IIS. They also say at MSDN that OWIN is a way to optimize applications for the cloud, but I can’t see how this relates to decoupling application and server and how OWIN allows this.

So, after all, what is the real need for OWIN? Why does it optimize applications for the cloud?

Answer 1

This technology allows, for example, replacing the need for IIS to serve websites or webservices. The motivation is flexibility, which in the case of replacing the OSI can mean more performance.

Imagine a small system, exist for the mere purpose of listening to any port and provide some services using a REST interface... type, on the local machine same, you want to do a service to locate files on the machine. There you had two alternatives: listen to the requests at hand, and implement a request response pipeline, using Socket, or else implement a webservice that uses IIS... now there is a third option, which is to implement the OWIN interface, which is simpler than doing everything by hand, and does not require a bulldozer (IIS) just to carry a few stones.

Reference:

When should I use OWIN Katana?