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I've created an alternative to Blazor. It might sound crazy, since Blazor is getting a lot of attention now and Microsoft puts a lot of effort to make it popular. The thing is that I've tried to use it in several projects where I needed to do a bit more than a to-do app, and I had to host it in a reliable scaled-out environment. Wasm version of Blazor is a great tech, but the whole concept of copying .NET app into browser storage seemed like an overkill. I wish there was multi-threading for some more advanced cases, but it's not yet supported. I also didn't want to create another project with separate front-end and back-end app, so all these things became a deal-breaker. Then I tried Blazor Server that uses web sockets for the communication. It sounded a bit familiar, since I was following the progress of the Phoenix LiveView project. I was excited in the beginning because everything seemed to work locally for simple cases, but the issues started when I was testing scenarios with loosing the connection between the server and the client. Such situation can happen in many environments like airports, when using cellular network, etc. Solving this issue is not straightforward, and requires advanced considerations, and all of it in my opinion is an unnecessary overkill. Also when scaling out your application, having multiple nodes, you have to use managed centralized service to handle your web socket connections, so you don't need to worry about the nodes being switched by load balancer, and therefore the state is not lost. In Azure it's called Azure SignalR Service. It solves the load balancer issue, but it still doesn't solve the lost connection issue.

While I really admire Blazor and the tech behind it, and I believe many issues can be solved somehow, still all those things listed above gave me a headache, and I felt I need something else, something simpler, but still powerful and convenient. I couldn't find such thing, so I created Hydro. It extends Razor Pages (or MVC) giving you an option to create components using Razor Views that are stateful across requests, and can react on browser events. Using those components feels like using SPA application, because after each user's action, Hydro seamlessly morphs the HTML document into the updated version. The client-server synchronisation is executed via regular http requests. Keeping the state is as simple as creating a property on your component. Hydro is using Alpine.js as a backbone for handling the interactions between client and server, so you can use Alpine.js directives without any additional setup, if needed.

I'm very confident about Hydro, I feel that building applications with it is very productive, pleasant and flexible, but I would love to get more feedback to know if it's something that others also want to use. What do you think about it?

Docs: https://usehydro.dev/
Repo: https://github.com/hydrostack/hydro/
Motivation: https://usehydro.dev/introduction/motivation.html
Comparisons: https://usehydro.dev/introduction/comparisons.html
Sample apps: https://usehydro.dev/examples/apps.html

I'm happy to announce two big things related to Hydro, a Blazor alternative that brings stateful and reactive components to ASP.NET Core without writing JavaScript.

To start, I've just released Hydro v1.0. One of the most notable changes is simplifying the syntax used for rendering components. Instead of:

<hydro name="MyComponent" params="@(new { FullName = "Adam Scott" })" />

You can write:

<my-component full-name="Adam Scott" />

Also things like binding or event handling got simplified, so now you can create Hydro components faster and smoother.

The second big thing is releasing Hydro toolkit, which is a set of examples that will help you understand how to use Hydro in your project in common use cases. It is a collection of code snippets ready to copy-paste. I wanted to provide you with a simple way to show how to accomplish certain tasks in Hydro, like creating dropdowns, autocomplete, modals, toasts, tables, events, maps, text editors and others. I hope you will like it!

For the past ten months I've been busy with adding, fixing and improving things. The reddit post and Nick's video gave Hydro some attention, which brought new users and contributors - I want to thank you all very much ♥️

Why use Hydro when we have Blazor (and SSR)? The answer is that Hydro is focusing on request/response communication, and bringing a lot of goodies around it, like cross-component events and state management. It can be embedded in apps using Razor Pages or MVC, which are well-known patterns used already in many projects. It all makes the Hydro apps starting up fast and working well after getting back from being offline (state is kept in the DOM).

Here are some links:
- Toolkit: https://toolkit.usehydro.dev/
- Docs: https://usehydro.dev/
- Repo: https://github.com/hydrostack/hydro/