Evaluating Blazor WebAssembly for the Progressive Web Application Front-End : A Comparative Study Using ReactJS as a Baseline

Abstract: This study is conducted to evaluate the Blazor WebAssembly framework for the Progressive Web Application (PWA) methodology. A comparative study is conducted with a ReactJS PWA as a baseline. The two frameworks are evaluated in their front-end performance and documentation of PWA-focused subjects. Front-end performance is measured between two experimental applications that test the loading times, heap memory usage and loading consistency during layout generation. It is found that a Blazor WebAssembly PWA takes on average a range of 0.34, 0.18, and 0.06 seconds less time to generate a layout than a ReactJS PWA. The Blazor WebAssembly PWA was less consistent in its loading times when handling many elements. Documentation that covers Progressive Web Application terminology was found to be different between the frameworks. The Blazor WebAssembly documentation covers more topics and provides first-hand knowledge while the ReactJS documentation covers fewer topics and relies on external sources to provide the necessary explanations. These findings indicate that Blazor WebAssembly is a faster framework when updating large amounts of elements in comparison to ReactJS. However, the ReactJS PWA was found to be overall more consistent in its loading times. Documentation varied between the two frameworks. Documentation in Blazor WebAssembly covers more Progressive Web Application subjects and is more in-depth than ReactJS.  This study only evaluates applications developed in ReactJS and Blazor WebAssembly. Both are tested on Google Chrome in a desktop environment.