My team and I have received funding to start developing an Enterprise level web application (won't go into details of what it does). The application will have many separate web pages but two of those pages being more focused and very heavy – heavy as in a lot of user interaction, modals that display mass data, websocket connections, chat, etc.
I have been assigned to Chief Architect on the project, so I am doing some research into the latest web frameworks. For the back end, we have done some testing and have decided to go with the Azure SQL platform. So far, I am liking the improvements that have been made, and are being made, to ASP.NET with Core 2.0. Specifically the Razor engine, over previous versions of ASP.NET MVC.
I wanted to get some expert opinions on the "new" Razor vs. Angular/React and the like. I'm particularly more concerned with performance. How does Core 2.0 Razor hold up to client side rendering frameworks? Are the differences negligible? Our app is targeting a potential 1,000,000 users (roughly 100,000 concurrent).
Thanks in advance!
Best Answer
We ended up going with an Angular front-end and an ASP.NET Core API backend, using Azure SQL. We tested Core Razor and, although better than legacy Razor, Angular was much faster for us in the end. As far as user experience goes, Angular (or React) is far superior in terms of performance. The model-binding aspects of Angular we found to be a gigantic advantage of server-side rendering. Using Razor(or server side rendering in general) does, however, lend itself to better overall integrity as far as data goes and it makes for a better transition of data from front-end to back-end. There is a true disconnect between a front-end framework and an API. All data that is passed to the server has to be cast into typed objects - this means you have to manage two separate POCO model sets. This can cause issues if server objects and front-end objects do not align. At the moment, Entity Framework Core is not very matured so we have issues with updating objects, querying objects, including child objects, etc.
Overall, this setup has worked out great for us so far! I would imagine React would be a similar replacement to Angular if you're more comfortable with it. I had to learn Angular, which was a very easy transition, and I love it now!