It's only been a year since I wrote ASP.NET Core and Angular 2, but it definitely feels a lot more, at least from a web developer's perspective. Modern web technologies are still improving at lightning-fast speed, with an increasing, perceptible, and measurable interest being in the client-side aspects of the game. Angular, React, and VueJS collected no less than 150,000 StackOverflow questions in the latest 18 months, which is more than 250 per day--and the trend is still growing.
That's to be expected, since most of the major conceptual changes that occurred between 2015 and 2017 have been hitting the clients way more than the servers; we switched from a reactive approach of doing stuff--that led us to build responsive, resilient, elastic, and message-driven Single-Page Apps (SPAs)--to a progressive way of seeing things--which materialized into Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). The change of perspective is slight, yet prominent; far from being a different paradigm, what we've seen was nothing less than the natural and inevitable evolution of the same original concepts.
Compared to the SPA revolution that took place in 2015-2016, the rise of Progressive Web Apps is not a game-breaking event; we can say that PWAs inherit all the major concepts that were already part of the Reactive Manifesto and bring them further on with brand new features--such as Service Workers--that would not have been possible without some relevant client-side accomplishments such as HTML5, modern browsers, and ECMAScript 6. PWAs are a much expected improvement in the present that also emphasizes its increasing distance from the past. At the same time, PWAs are not meant to be the future, not because they won't become a standard--they definitely will--but because they will also improve and, eventually, collapse into something else. This is how the client side of the moon always worked and--hopefully--always will.
What happened to the other side, then? We can't possibly say that 2017 wasn't an intense year for server-side technologies; Node.js is still dominating the scene, with more than 8 million confirmed instances online at the moment and trustable surveys telling us that three developers out of four will deal with it even more than they did. As well as the raw and naked usage, there is also a crowded galaxy of modern web frameworks based on Node, boosting its popularity even more, such as Hapi, Express, Restify, Koa, Sails, and Adonis, just to mention some of them. Django continues to focus on stability, with the 1.11 LTS bringing a lot of minor and major fixes; the next major release, expected for December, will also bring some neat improvements such as simplified URL routing syntax, window expressions, and improved Phyton 3.x support. The whole PHP ecosystem, which seemed to be slowly but steadily doomed to lose ground, regained some breath thanks to the great performance achievements reached by PHP 7.1 (in late 2016) and the huge number of available frameworks--Symfony, Laravel, Zend, Yii, Expressive, Silex, Slim, and more--each of which is best suited for a distinctive set of patterns, use cases, and scenarios. Last but definitely not least, comes ASP.NET; the .NET Core 2.0 release features some major improvements that make it easier to use and also more capable as a platform: major performance boosts in both framework and runtime, six new supported platforms--including Debian, SUSE, and macOS--and even ARM32-native builds for running apps on Raspberry Pi.
If we try to connect all these dots, we can easily see how most of the innovative, experimental, and rule-changing aspects of web development are nowadays skewed toward the client side, while the server-side race is more focused on performance and stability. Nonetheless, both sides of the coin share a strong common ground built upon the concepts of readability, maintainability, and overall simplicity of the source code.
Back in 2016, among all those different and yet kindred environments, we chose to focus on two of them: ASP.NET Core to cover the server-side aspects, and Angular to deal with the client side. Apart from the technical reasons, we also did this because these two frameworks had something in common that we did like: both of them were a reboot of a massively popular previous installment that played a leading role in their respective field. That was a bold, revolutionary move that we liked a lot. Should we do the same in 2017 as well? Are ASP.NET Core 2 and Angular 5 still a viable choices to deal with Progressive Web Apps, lightning-speed performance, and code simplicity?
In short, the answer is yes, and the book you're about to read will do its very best to prove it.
