Taking a Chance on Blazor: Redakt's Journey to Innovation

Back in 2019, during the development of Redakt's first version, we faced a critical decision in our technology strategy. Redakt CMS, designed to be an intuitive content management system, required a robust back-office application - essentially, the system's command center for content managers. We initially chose Angular for its client-side technology, a decision influenced by Angular's widespread popularity and proven track record as a leading single-page application (SPA) framework.

However, our path took an unexpected turn when we encountered Blazor, a new and promising web UI framework.

Developed as a personal project by Steve Sanderson of Microsoft and unveiled at NDC Oslo in 2017, Blazor was initially based on an interpreted .NET CIL (Common Intermediate Language) runtime called DotNetAnywhere. Its potential, albeit with limited features, was immediately evident.

We hadn't paid much attention to Blazor before its release, as we were already committed to Angular. However, since we were developing Redakt CMS on the emerging .NET Core framework, we closely monitored all related developments. The inclusion of Blazor in .NET Core 3.0 caught our attention, leading us to explore its capabilities more thoroughly.

Blazor seemed well-suited for our vision of the Redakt back office. We aimed to create more than just a content management application; we envisioned it as a versatile web application framework. This framework was intended to not only implement the core functionalities of Redakt but also to enable agencies and system integrators to develop custom applications within our ecosystem, thereby facilitating digital transformation for their clients.

While Angular was a functional choice, it presented challenges, particularly in integrating front-end (Angular) and back-end (.NET Core) technologies. These distinct technologies required specialized developers, complicating the development process.

If you’ve seen job offers in the tech community, you’ve probably come across openings for “full-stack developers”. A full-stack developer is a person who is proficient in both client-side and server-side technologies. As somebody with firm roots in software engineering, my view on full-stack developers is skeptical. The disparity in technologies and approaches makes it rare to find individuals equally adept in both areas, especially in an enterprise software environment.

At Redakt, this division meant relying on specialized Angular and .NET Core developers. Consequently, our clients also needed expertise in these two domains to be able to use Redakt for custom back office application development.

Blazor offered a unified solution, using the same technology stack for both front-end and back-end development. This approach would streamline the development process for our team and our clients. Additionally, its component-based design aligned perfectly with our vision for an application development framework.

So, we decided to switch development of our back-office application over to Blazor. This decision was not taken lightly. It meant discarding substantial progress we had already made with Angular, which set us back quite a bit in our planning and incurred additional costs. However, we believed the potential benefits significantly outweighed these initial setbacks.

As we progressed with developing Redakt CMS and our back-office application, Blazor continued its steady development and gained popularity. The introduction of Blazor WebAssembly in 2020, enabling .NET code execution in the browser, marked another leap forward. Blazor Hybrid, included in .NET 7 in 2022, further expanded Blazor's capabilities across various platforms.