If you work in a professional environment, then you might have heard about Slack.
It is one of the most popular communication platforms for workplaces. In fact, depending on your job, it is your only form of social interaction.
In our office, Slack is pretty dormant when it is late, but one night, all my channels started firing up, one notification followed by another.
When I checked the notifications, everyone was doing the same thing, but in different words: Praising Blazor and the WASM module, WebAssembly. One of our web development teams started using Blazor that night, and for a lack of better words, they fell in love with the technology.
At first, I was a little surprised that professional developers would be so excited as to fire up my Slack, like a bunch of fireworks. After all, these were experienced professionals who have had to transition to new technologies several times throughout their careers.
But after thinking about it, I wasn’t too surprised. Blazor brings a lot of advantages to web application development that can’t be found elsewhere.
Let’s discuss some of these advantages.
New possibilities in developing web applications
To better explain why Blazor is such a big deal, we need to take a look at the current modus operandi of web development.
The state of web application development before Blazor
For over a decade, Javascript has been the preferred programming language in web development for years. But the language comes with its fair share of challenges.
It is difficult to learn Javascript, the language is quite unwieldy and held up the development process in certain areas. For example, the need for data validation in the server.
However, most importantly, the over-reliance on Javascript has held up innovation on the development front. Since Node.js was the only language that could be used for browser-logic, it meant that developers had to learn Javascript to develop web applications.
Furthermore, the over-reliance on Javascript means developers cannot use another programming language that is cleaner, sleeker and more expressive. Some of the shortcomings of Javascript make it difficult to develop more advanced, performance-intensive applications.
How Blazor resolves this problem
Given all these technical shortcomings and restrictions, Blazor comes across as an incredible alternative for web developers. It opens up the option to go beyond Javascript and its limitations.
One of the biggest advantages of Blazor and WebAssembly over Javascript is the use of the .Net framework. .Net can now be directly loaded onto the browser-side, which means code can be written in different languages besides Javascript
This is because Blazor allows developers to use the same language on the client-side and the browser-side, which means entire web applications can be built using an alternative programming language that is more efficient than Javascript, like C#.
Developers no longer have to learn Javascript to build web applications, which opens up a lot of options in web application development.
However, another significant benefit of Blazor is sharing code on both the client and server-side. Sharing the same language makes the process more efficient.
It is a huge advantage in web application development because it eliminates so many unnecessary steps from the development process. By sharing code on both the server and client-side, code only needs to be modified once, so developers don’t have to rewrite code twice, saving a lot of development time.
One of the biggest benefits of Blazor is that it makes Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) easier to develop. This is because Blazor runs in a memory safe sandbox that allows for applications to run as fast as their native counterparts. Blazor makes it much easier to develop progressive web applications that merge the benefits of native applications with the advantages of web applications.
Blazor for the win!
Blazor is not perfect. For example, server-side Blazor only runs as part of a .Net application. The use of SignalR limits the number of simultaneous connections, which means the application needs to be scaled, accordingly. However, there is no denying that Blazor has opened up a lot of advantages for web application development that was previously not possible.
Blazor is exciting because it not only makes development easier but also allows for the development of feature-rich applications that demand more performance. But most importantly, Blazor will pave the way for more innovation in web application development, which is something we desperately need after nearly a decade of relying on Javascript.
