Developing web applications is a trying business. As someone who has overseen so many development projects in the past, I have come to realise that the one thing that hurts productivity is inefficiency. We have all experienced this problem, but what is it exactly?
When I say inefficiencies in processes, I am referring to redundant, repetitive steps we don’t need. These are small steps, and you don’t really notice them, but their influence derails progress, especially in applications development where speed and efficiency are important.
Hence, why I am so excited about Blazor WebAssembly. It shows a lot of promise in addressing the technical challenges that hinder the development process.
What is Blazor WebAssembly?
For those of you who don’t know, WebAssembly is a stack-based virtual machine that runs code consistently between 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, including operating systems, major browsers and even mobile devices. It’s a sandbox that executes bytecode predefined instructions that expand to a suite of operations beyond what more established web programming languages are capable of.
Blazor WebAssembly is an exciting prospect because it promises to eliminate the inefficiencies that plague our development processes.
How does WebAssembly eliminate inefficiencies?
Web development can be a trying process. While we can pull off some amazing things when building a website, pulling them off is fraught with technical challenges. As you can imagine, this becomes problematic when you have an entire team of web developers working on a project and clients waiting on a tight deadline.
You’d want to make the work as efficient and as easy possible, that’s where Blazor WebAssembly comes into play. Following in the wake of Blazor Server, WebAssembly was the second option for supporting Blazor components and was built to make the development of web applications more efficient than before.
Here are a few ways it does this:
Removes extra steps in the process
When using other forms of code, you need to parse script and pre-compile for optimisation. As some of you may know, parsing is when code is read line by line for errors – if the code has no errors, a database called an abstract syntax tree will be created, which is then translated into machine code and output.
This is a time-consuming process that hinders productivity, especially when there are errors found (in which case, the processing is stopped until errors are resolved).
However, this is not a problem with Blazor WebAssembly because the code is already in byte code format. This is because Web Assembly Modules (WASM) contain lower assembly language, like intermediate code, that can be produced by compilers of other programming languages.
Since WASM code is already in binary format, it does not need to be parsed, saving time and effort when launching code, which helps with performance.
Use different web programming languages
One significant roadblock to web application development is the overdependence on a single coding language, which has severely limited our options. Blazor WebAssembly opened up the possibility of compiling code into different languages because of its low-level byte code.
The possibility of programming web applications into a variety of languages can help us create different web development models down the line.
It makes a developer’s life much easier
Web developers have reacted positively to Blazor WebAssembly because it makes their lives so much easier. It comes with several features that allow developers to optimise the process, like the ability to reuse .Net code through standard libraries. Instead of having to code everything from scratch, developers can pull code from standard libraries and reuse them when needed, reducing development time.
Web developers can use familiar languages, like C# and .Net, to build client-side apps, which saves time and effort from re-learning a new programming language. Furthermore, Blazor WebAssembly can run on all modern web browsers, including mobile browsers, without the need for plug-ins, making it so much easier to build a web application.
Is Blazor WebAssembly the future?
Blazor WebAssembly is still in its early days, so it’s not going to replace the established stalwarts of web programming anytime soon. But it holds tremendous promise for web developers and programmers. WebAssembly makes development so much easier, providing the shortcuts that can eliminate inefficient processes.
This means more time will be spent on creative solutions and less time dealing with inefficiencies that derail progress, which will benefit businesses in the end.
