2022-04-28
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#react
Ejiro Asiuwhu
32515
Apr 28, 2022 â‹… 10 min read

React vs. Blazor: Minimize JavaScript in your SPAs

Ejiro Asiuwhu Software engineer with a drive for building highly scalable and performant web applications. Heavily interested in module federation, micro frontends, state machines, TDD, and system designs. Big on web performance and optimization, advanced component design patterns, a11y, SSR, SSG, ISR, and state management. Expert at crafting highly reusable TypeScript-heavy component libraries.

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19 Replies to "React vs. Blazor: Minimize JavaScript in your SPAs"

  1. Huge mistake there in performance, blazor in this case compiles to web assembly, so is not true that the client needs to download the entire. Net ecosystem plus the dll. Misleading and untrue.

  2. I have an incredible amount of bias, but I absolutely love how elegant Blazor is. The implementation of components with getters and setters? Fantastic telegraphing. Binding is just dead simple. Building a modern front end framework off of such a strong base like ASP.NEat just makes a ton of sense.

  3. A tad biased towards React my friend and get your facts right before trying to play down the benefits and performance of Blazor… It is the future…

  4. Mono runtime and app dll’s are downloaded “once” in Blazor wasm. From then on, the only interaction with the server is for fetching json data for binding to UI. Blazor is literally blazing fast after the initial app download. With the upcoming AOT changes in .Net 6, Blazor will be much more faster and efficient even in initial download size and performance.

  5. Blazor is definitely the future. It’s crazy how quickly it has been able to get to the point where it’s comparable to the major JavaScript frameworks that have been at this for so long. I was very apprehensive at the start of going the Blazor route, but after using it, I never want to look back.

  6. You’re comparing apples to oranges here. React is a library, and Blazor is a framework. For example, React can be used standalone by just loading a script from a CDN. This article does a disservice to both technologies.

  7. I see a lot of enthusiastic comments below each of Blazor article but not agree. I worked with Blazor not so much but after one MVP I can say that I don’t like Blazor. Maybe some days it will be ready to touch my hart, but not today:

    1. Blazor is slow. Maybe it is only for me, but I can see a little lag after each click;
    2. has almost no 3rd party libraries. You need to create your own UI-components or choose between just a couple of UI-libraries (half of them are paid). And these UI-libraries often ugly and have bugs even on demo pages;
    3. “You can use one language for front and back” (of only we had Node.js). Yes, but no. You still need to know JS, because WebAssembly has no access to browser API’s by design. You can not work with canvas directly, as an example. Also scrolls, querySelectors, elements positions and so on;
    4. using JS-libraries is complicated. You need to download source codes and put them into `wwwroot` folder, then add js- and css-files into your `index.html` (you can use webpack for this, but you have to do it yourself, Blazor doesn’t have this functionality out of the box);
    5. no LESS/SASS, you also need webpack (not sure how to do it for css-isolation).

    Maybe some of these issues have been fixed in fresh releases.

  8. The “Stars” is for the old Blazor repo, Blazor is part of ASP.NET Core and is therefore maintained with the rest of ASP.NET Core https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore. I think this changed over a year ago with the first release.

    @Ivan, LESS/SASS is supported using a preprocessor, its the same as normal css isolation in blazor, you’d do something like Page.razor.less which would be compiled into Page.razor.css before the build and would then get packed as you’d expect a plain isolated css file. Blazor can use any JS based UI elements, so yes although there isn’t that many Blazor native packs, it’s not hard to use JS based ones where you logic is still within the C# side. Blazor is still a bit slow, but most of the slowness is due to incorrect writing of the page, it’s still in its infancy perf wise and has a long way to go to catch up to javascript based frameworks. I find it responsive enough so long as you don’t use asynchronous JS interop and make sure you use the virtualizer feature for long lists.

  9. Interesting that no one’s given Server-side Blazor consideration (which is what I’m using). The first-page initial download is rediculously small (because it’s all on the server!), and once that SignalR hub has your front-end wired up to the back-end server via a WebSocket connection – the interaction is pretty fast. I’ve even done terrible things like have a timer on the server firing UI changes down to the browser 30 times a second (like JQuery animation used to) – and it responds well! (no, this is not production code.)

    One major advantage Server-side Blazor has is access to data. Your code is probably already running in Azure / AWS, and you’re a lot closer to the data than your client-side cousins, so if you take the hit of not trying to hide behind an IHTTP interface of some kind, you can crack open the Entity Framework, and grab that data! No translation to JSON objects necessary. So in this way, you may actually asynchronously perform updates to the UI (a little) faster than you could with front-end code relaying information via a Service’s API. We also get the benefit of having web-events poking your back-end to inform it of database changes, which can then be pushed down to the front end. In server-side Blazor, that kind of thinking seems a little easier to implement as a result of the underlying SignalR connection. Also, your code feels more like a part of the server, and that logical separation of concerns, which shifts the way you think about the code.

    I don’t think at this point there’s any getting around the fact that some JQuery knowledge is still required. But seriously, that’s bare-bones thinking. Despite this fact, at least 99% ouir development hasn’t needed any javascript interaction, except via 3rd party UI components. Who on the javascript side doesn’t use a 3rd party library like Bootstrap for UI components, and css magic? The same is true for Blazor. You’re likely to accomplish most of your work with 3rd party libraries (there are both commercial and open-source options) so complex ui components and areas we just can’t touch (such as Canvas, as previously mentioned) are now well within our grasp with C# interactions.
    Isn’t there always a library out there tryingf to solve all your problems? The only problem now, is finding it (NuGet) and using it!!

  10. 1) Blazor Wasm is only slow for the initial app download after that it blazingly fast. However MS continues to improve this, it is after all a new framework.

    2) For most of the points you raise there I would say just checkout awesome Blazor https://github.com/AdrienTorris/awesome-blazor

    There are plenty of UI components for Blazor, you do not need to create your own UI-Components, dismissing them as ugly is a matter of opinion.

    3. Yes you can use C# for both front end and back end. The fact that you can use JavaScript for both front end and back does not take away from the fact that you can use C# in a similar way. That simply means you have a choice. You can work with the canvas using a Blazor canvas extension and Blazor gives you reference to HTML elements via @ref and ElementReference, so you can deal with element positions and so on.

    4. There is nothing complicated about using JS libraries, many can be installed automatically via NuGet, and Blazor/C# wrappers already exists for many popular ones such as for chartJs, ironically Canvas etc. There may be need to setup up some js interop but that is usually a matter of copy and paste. How hard is it to add JS and CSS refences to an index.html file? Is there any website that does not use them?

    Yes Blazor is new but it is remarkable how well it already stacks up to JS frameworks. One should not approach it with the same mindset of using JS. I know JS but for the Blazor production apps I have already completed I have hardly ever needed to write any lines of JS beyond to setup some interOp with a third party JS library. However a lot of JS libraries I have need have an equivalent C# implementation or a wrapper already from the days of asp.net MVC and webforms. This point of knowing JS is exaggerated, Blazor was designed for C# developers to write SPA application with very little need if at all to know JS.

  11. Blazor apps have latency issues. So if you’re building a web application that’s going to be accessed by people across the globe, Blazor is not your go-to framework.

    If it’s WASM then once the initial package is downloaded to the client there are no other calls needed other than network calls like fetching data from a database. The app essentially functions like an old school Windows Forms app.

    1. If it is an application (say an app for graphics designing) where the user is going to spend considerable time, then waiting for couple of seconds more is worth having it.

  12. Fantastic blog. 1000 times better than YouTube video.
    Learning is tiresome through videos. Good old text will eventually win over !

  13. Blazor Server, Blazor Hybrid are simply awesome. SignalR is fast, direct data access, finally! With Blazor Hybrid I wrote an Android app, deployed in record time. WASM not so much (yet), etc. Wait until .NET8 with multi-threading. Microsoft is finally going in the right direction. Sorry but this article is biased. I understand the allure of React (which is not even a platform) but do some serious analysis first before posting half truths!

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