Introduction: Blazor is a new framework and current research show that there is a lack of performance comparisons. Therefore, a need to compare and evaluate this new Blazor framework is ought to be requested to show if it can compete with one of the best and most used frameworks, Angular. It is also one of the few web developing frameworks that has moved away from using JavaScript and therefore a comparison with a framework that uses JavaScript will be very interesting.
Aim: The aim of this study is to make a performance comparison between two web applications using the Angular and Blazor frameworks. I will evaluate the performance and present the results to see if Blazor can compete with Angular as a modern web development framework. More specifically, the study aims to answer the following research question:
Based on a performance evaluation would it be favorable for a developer or company to consider usingthe Blazor framework over the Angular framework when developing web applications?
Method: I started by doing a literature review of the field I wanted to research. I used du.se library search engine, which had access to the DiVa portal, Google scholar, Summon and Libris etc. The literature was found using the keywords “Blazor”, “Angular”, “Web application”, “Framework”, “Comparison” and “Evaluation”. Thereafter, two web applications were developed for the purpose of performance evaluation of the two frameworks. An evaluation tool was used to create the report based on the measurement criterions: “First Contentful Paint”, “Time to Interactive”, “Speed Index”, “Total Blocking Time”, “Largest Contentful Paint” and “Cumulative Layout Shift”. When evaluating I summed up which framework that was more favorable in each category and displayed it in tables and graphs.
Results: I found that the Angular framework was more favourable in 4 out of the 6 criterions. Even though Angular performed better overall it showed some very unstable performance results during the twenty tests. Blazor displayed a stable performance throughout all twenty tests in all categories and was very fast and responsive once the initial load of the client was done.
Conclusions: Based on the results Angular was the more favourable framework during my tests, due to overall performance. But the Angular framework showed too many inconsistencies during the tests to call it superior, meanwhile Blazor performed very stable results. This indicates that the Blazor framework can possibly compete with the Angular framework as a modern web development framework. Thus, my conclusion is that it would be favourable for developers and companies to consider using the Blazor framework for new projects, especially if they have previous experience with the C# language or are new to web developement.
2021.