A comparison of web development frameworks, platforms, and technology stacks.
Book Intro and Foreward
When I started getting into web development in 1997, we mostly concentrated on learning the technologies it took to create webpages and websites by hand. I started with a whole SAM’s publishing book on HTML and CSS. And at the end of that book it started talking about JavaScript. So I bought a book on JavaScript and at the end of that book it started talking about Classic ASP (known at that time of course as just ASP). ASP may have been a bit spaghetti like, but it was still based on the assumption that a web developer knew how the web works. We had to pick out data from Request.Form or Request.QueryString for example. Then with ASP.Net came WebForms and an abstraction layer was laid on top of how the web works. I spent many hours reverse engineering the WebForms pipeline and lifecycle to get something to work right which would have been much quicker back in classic ASP which kind of annoyed me. A lot of wasted evenings.
Meanwhile a new technology was emerging called AJAX. So now in addition to all the technologies we need in order to program websites (html, JavaScript, CSS, ASP, and SQL), you also needed to know concepts like the difference between round-trip applications and SPAs (Single Page Applications). I did web forms for 10 years before I got into MVC which has now been another 14 years. MVC returned to the concept of giving control over the HTML back to the programmer. But while us Server-Side programmers were becoming experts at the likes of ASP.Net, ASP.Net Core, and Ruby on Rails, a whole new underground set of technologies were being developed in JavaScript. A client-Side eco-system rivaling that of server-side development. Now the two worlds have merged into applications with both a Server-Side Application and a UI or client-side application.
It took me over 20 years to learn the basic information in the above paragraphs. And I don’t want other new developers just starting their careers to have to spend countless hours picking through dozens of books, or going through hundreds of online tutorials and videos just to get to a good starting point in their web development educations.
Book Description
This book is for beginning to intermediate developers who are interested in ASP.Net Core first and foremost.
In Part 1: Building a website. The basics., you’ll be taken through creating a car dealership website from scratch called, “Fred’s Cars, Jeeps & Trucks” using only the basics; HTML, JavaScript, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). You’ll build a landing page with a search feature for vehicles and a details page for one of those vehicles. This part gives the you the knowledge, tools, and experience to start exploring dynamic platforms, frameworks, and technologies that can help a developer automate a lot of cumbersome and repetitive work.
In Part 2: ASP.Net: Dynamic Applications, Data and Frameworks, we rebuild the car dealership in ASP.Net Core. You’ll see how to build it in several frameworks; Two server-side frameworks called MVC and Razor Pages and one client-side framework called Blazor. In this part you’ll start getting into exciting technologies like Entity Framework Core and Razor to create the backend, data access, and UI (User Interface).
In Part 3: Client-Side Technologies and Singe Page Applications we build the car dealership in another client-side technology called Angular. Angular is one of the most popular client-side languages. We cover Blazor in Part 2 first to group it with ASP.Net Core technologies, but Angular came first and Blazor is Microsoft’s answer to client-side SPA frameworks like Angular, React and Vue.
In Part 4: Full Stack Applications, we see how to combine the first two concepts (server-side and client-side technologies) into one unified single project. This is called Full Stack programming. Full Stack developers are in high demand these days. In this part we’ll see how to create backend WebServices with ASP.Net Core serving up data for the car dealership and use Angular to consume, show, and render that data for a rich user experience.
In Part 5: Alternative Client-Side technologies we explore two other client-side technologies; React and Vue.js. In chapters 8 and 9 we’ll build the car dealership in React alone just like we do using Angular in Part 3, Chapter 6. And then we will replace Angular with React as the client-side language in a Full-Stack application. In chapters 10 and 11 we’ll follow this process again using Vue.js as the client-side language alone and in a Full-Stack application. The point of these exercises is to show that client-side languages are very mature and can be used to build an application from top to bottom without the need for a server-side language or platform. But most applications these days are built in a full-stack manor.
Throughout this book we’ll learn the ins and outs of the most popular client-side and server-side languages and see how to combine server-side and client-side technologies into one unified single project. We’ll also learn the pros and cons between round trip and single page applications and the pros and cons between different frameworks and technologies. Some tools might be better for certain types of projects. Others might fit certain development styles better. This book is meant to be a beginner to intermediate level consolidation of where web development stands today.
What Readers will learn
Readers of this book will learn the simple nut and bolt tasks needed to build everyday webpages and websites. They will become familiar with the basic building block components of the web, namely, HTML, CSS and JavaScript and become comfortable at manually laying out static pages with these technologies and see how these technologies complement each other and fit together hand-in-hand.
Next the reader will move up from laying out static webpages by hand and take advantage of the many platforms, frameworks, languages and technology stacks. In this part the reader will see that no matter which technology they choose the resulting building blocks are the same components they learned to lay out manually in chapter one. They are all just different twists on dynamically laying out the basic technology components intertwined and coupled together into an HTML page that a browser can interpret and render.
Target Audience
This book is targeted towards beginning to intermediate ASP.Net Core developers, or those evaluating ASP.Net Core as their main platform or part of their toolbox. Because of this a lot of the book’s content will flow around ASP.Net Core concepts and ASP.Net Core as the glue that holds everything together. Although, one of the concepts in exploring client-side technologies is that these technologies are robust and mature and every bit as capable of being used to develop a web application from top to bottom as ASP.Net Core is. And these standalone client-side chapters will receive as much attention on being quick moving nut-and-bolt step-by-step guides in building a basic website from top to bottom as the server-side chapters.