MDriven is all about defining the perfect specification and automatically executing that in a modern tech-stack.
Tech-stacks age, so we need to produce new model executors.
We have been through many already in our company’s history (Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET, MVC… ) – and now it’s time again.
What differs this time is that we do not change the delivery mechanism: browser, HTML5, and CSS.
We are moving from AngularJS to Blazor as the supporting client framework.
Why? If we still use the browser, why bother?
It is important to say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the AngularJS-based front-end for MDriven systems. In fact, this frontend is acting as the specification on what a front end for MDriven systems should do.
Nevertheless, there are a few shortcomings to AngularJS as such:
- Google has stopped supporting AngularJS as of 2022 – and even if this is not an immediate problem, it probably will be sooner or later.
- AngularJS is a JavaScript framework and JavaScript is hard to write, read, and debug, and thus, labour intensive. This shifts our focus from high-level understandable logic to odd edge-cases that consume hours to track down.
- Giving you control to inject your own specialized UI-widgets required you to use AngularJS and we do not like the idea of asking you to build things in a – nowadays – unsupported framework.
Why Blazor?
We have scanned for candidates to base the MDriven frontend on – and since they must be browser-based, they were all based on JavaScript. JavaScript was one of the problem drivers for us.
- Blazor is based on C# compiled into web-assembly. This is a great fit for us who use C# and .net8 in the other parts of our products.
- Furthermore, we wanted a candidate to have a trustworthy future – and we believe that opensource’d and Microsoft-backed Blazor has exactly this.
- We also believe that creating a great environment for UI extensions with your own UI widgets will be easier with Blazor than it was with AngularJS.
The work on the new Blazor frontend has started – watch the current status in the video below:
2 thoughts on “Technology gets old. No reason your system cannot live forever.”