Evaluating Blazor : A comparative examination of a web framework

Abstract: For my thesis work I have done an evaluation of the newly released Microsoft developed web framework Blazor. My methodology is based upon a couple of previous articles about evaluating web frameworks. From these articles I have gathered a number of criteria used in my evaluation: documentation, lines of code,community size, framework usage, framework maturity, framework freshness, browser support and framework cost. Additionally, since Blazor is based on C# instead of JavaScript, I have included a 9th criterion, comparing JavaScript with C#. Many of the criteria need some kind of counterpart for Blazor to be compared with, for this purpose I have mainly used the established web framework Angular, and in some cases Ember.js. When evaluating, I have not expected Blazor to exceed Angular. Rather I have counted all cases where Blazor can at least be considered comparable to Angular (or Ember.js) as favourable.I found that overall Blazor did very well in the comparison as 6 out of the 8 criteria I took from the articles evaluated favourably for Blazor. The two criteria where I found Blazor lacking were framework usage and framework maturity. While there are large numbers of showcases and example sites I did not find any large production websites developed with Blazor, and for obvious reasons the framework that was officially released earlier this year has yet to reach a mature state. Furthermore I found the extra criteria, JavaScript vs C#, was favourable to Blazor.Thus, my conclusion is that Blazor is certainly worth picking up for new projects. I argue that even though the framework is not yet fully mature it has come far in its short lifespan, and that even though Blazor is not widely used yet it is unlikely to go away considering that it is developed and supported by a large company like Microsoft.