Preceding Blazor

You probably didn’t get this book to read about JavaScript, but it helps to remember that we are coming from a pre-Blazor time. I recall that time – the dark times. Many of the concepts used in Blazor are not that far from those used in many JavaScript frameworks, so I will start with a brief overview of our challenges.

As developers, we have many different platforms we can develop for, including desktop, mobile, games, the cloud (or server-side), AI, and even IoT. All these platforms have a lot of different languages to choose from, but there is, of course, one more platform: the apps that run inside the browser.

I have been a web developer for a long time, and I’ve seen code move from the server to run within the browser. It has changed the way we develop our apps. Frameworks such as Angular, React, Aurelia, and Vue have changed the web from reloading the whole page to updating small parts on the fly. This new on-the-fly update method...