Watch out Angular, here comes Blazor!
I love Single Page Application (SPA) technologies like Angular and React - they make AWESEOME web UI possible. I know this technology well. I had to built such a framework myself before angular became available.
On the other hand, I hate SPA technologies because of the mess I see them creating!
It is a love and hate relationship which often forces me to make the most unwelcomed recommendation to forego the benefits they offer, for a simpler, cheaper, faster-delivered, less costly to maintain plain old server-side technologies like MVC or PHP (yuk!).
Fact is, many web apps, do not need the flashiest, coolest UI. In my experience, employing any SPA technology, adds 2-3X in development and maintenance time, even for mature teams. People often disagree with me about at first, but I have been proven right too many times. I hate it!
I hate it because I truly love what can be achieved using these frameworks. I know, because using the underlying browser technologies that Angular/React use, allowed me to build an awesomely rich, snappy and well performing game interface that has been used by millions of players. Don’t take my word for it, you can see for yourself. I managed to have the EXACT same code, run on desktop browser and mobile devices, and that was back in 2012.
But please, trust me - ?it is seriously not easy to build such applications!
As a consultant, every client is eager to “do Angular”, React or similar. All too often, I must caution against that choice. I hate doing so. Everyone is disappointed. No one wants to work with old technology!
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I have stumbled on something, that has the potential to change everything!
Besides POCs, I do not do much development anymore. But there was something which struck my curiosity back in 2018 - a new browser technology called Web Assembly. It designed to allow us to write browser-code not in JavaScript but in any language. Such code would be compiled to “web-assembly” and executed by the browser at near-native speed. Could this be our way of out of the pitfalls of JavaScript? Or is that a throw back in time to the now long dead “Active X controls” that allowed us to deliver browser UI in Visual Basic? Will Web Assembly suffer the same faith? Well, so far it has not. I also noticed Microsoft pushing heavily a new technology called Blazor - their own SPA framework that takes advantage of Web Assembly.
My curiosity took the better of me, and I have been experimenting with Blazor since 2021, a few hours here or there.
To my surprise, Blazor is a very interesting alternative to Angular and React!
To my surprise, Blazor is actually a very interesting alternative for some of the use cases, for which I argued that Angular / React are not good choices for.
To be sure, I decided to build something with it, something that will be released and used by at least a handful of people, so that I can learn how it behaves, what are its pitfalls etc. The result is an arithmetic learning and practice application – LearnMath123.com – something I built for my kids, but opened for other to use as well.
In a series of articles, I would like to share my experience. I will share the good and the bad and analyze the business case for its adoption.
In the next part, we’ll dive deep into technical details of Blazor, and we’ll see what makes it tick.?