Building a website from scratch 15 years ago was a rather simple task. It did not include the complicated needs of dealing with the insane amount of screen resolutions to cater to different technologies like big-size monitors, ultra-high resolutions, and mobile devices. There was no need to learn “experimental” stuff such as AJAX, JSON, and XMLHttpRequest. The existing established DHTML-based techniques would suffice to get the job done.
The simple, quick ‘n’ dirty JavaScript hacks were good enough to create an impression without the complications of more advanced cross-platform JS libraries such as jQuery (2006). The features like login with Facebook, Sharing buttons, SEO meta tags, Twitter Cards, and RSS feeds were either deemed unnecessary or did not exist. These features were too time-consuming and knowledge-demanding features either way. To top this, many fully featured, great-looking, award-winning CMS solutions such as Drupal (2001), WordPress (2003), and Joomla (2005) hadn’t been born yet to compare our results with.
Sounds like a beautiful, simple world of web development, right? Nope. The Web is ever changing and evolving. Newer technologies keep coming up each day, bringing extensive features to create something that otherwise seemed impossible or simply imaginary.
The complexity level of an average website is constantly snowballing due to its diversified, extensive, and intense nature and innovations. This proved to be a boon for those who wanted to not only build website applications but also test the boundaries and challenge the age-old ways of web development. They dared to dream and persist in studying, communicating, and living the blowing storm of new technologies behind these winds of change.
As seasoned developers, we should be in the driving seat and adapt ourselves before being beaten down by the ever-increasing demands of our customers. Developing great web applications from scratch is still entirely possible, provided we use the apt tools and practice patience to understand how we can blend them together to achieve what we want.
Luckily, continuously evolving technology and innovation have also given birth to a lot of powerful frameworks that mitigate the insane amount of additional work required. One such environment includes server-side runtime environments like ASP.NET and Node.js. The list can't be complete without including many client-side frameworks that quickly made their way, such as AngularJS, React, VueJS. Also, a noteworthy addition to the list includes the new Angular reboot, which took off with version 2 and is now living through its fifth successful installment.
While working on my projects, I chose two that seemed to be the best-fit blending with my way of thinking: ASP.NET Core to cover the server-side aspects, and the new Angular to deal with the client-side. Apart from their elegant design and fancy features, they are also packed with something revolutionary in common. Both ASP.NET and Angular are a complete rewrite of their massively popular previous installments, which played a leading role in their respective field.
Why should a development team reinvent their widely-acknowledged wheel despite it being good? The answer is most likely that in an ever-changing world such as the one we’re living in, we should always keep moving forward. We should test our own limits and stretch out boundaries to newer arenas. We need to be humble and wise, embrace and sometimes even enforce the iterative processes required to forge better tools for building a more complex yet more enticing World Wide Web.
The team working on ASP.NET and Angular stood up to the challenges. Even after months of unstable releases and breaking interface changes, the framework was persistent in making itself seamless. Standing its ground with three major releases and more than 80,000 StackOverflow questions asked in less than 18 months, the frameworks proved that they were here for the long haul.
Do you agree?
If you want to know more about .NET Core and Angular, check out Valerio De Sanctis’ ASP.NET Core 2 and Angular 5. Become fluent in both frontend and backend web development by combining the impressive capabilities of ASP.NET Core 2 and Angular 5 from project setup right through the deployment phase.
Valerio De Sanctis is a skilled IT professional with over 12 years' experience in lead programming, web-based development, and project management using ASP.NET, PHP, and Java. He previously held senior positions at a range of financial and insurance companies, most recently serving as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer at a leading after-sales and IT service provider for many top-tier life and non-life insurance groups.
