Advice on adding a rich client to an existing ASP.NET WebForms app

I am a french teacher in computer science and I'm about to start a new project. Hre's the background : a colleague of mine has built a student response system similar to Socrative, albeit simpler. His project uses the ASP.NET WebForms technology and its UI feels rather outdated by today's standards for web apps (see the documentation to get an idea).

Our goal is to improve the UX by splitting the project in two :

• the server side containing business logic (authentication, assessment computation...) wouldn't be touched much and would continue to use ASP.NET. A JSON API would be created to expose the needed services.


• a new Web client would be written from scratch. It would consume the server services through the API and let users interact with data in a more modern way. We envision a single page web app using JavaScript heavily. I am in charge of this part.

I used to work as en engineer in CS with some background in Java/J2E, C++ and C#, and I know PHP and Twitter Bootstrap quite well. However, I'm new to JavaScript and professional front-end development. I have read this article, "You have ruined JavaScript" and "No more JavaScript frameworks" : what a mess ! I'd like to get advice on the following points :

• is the planned architecture coherent ? (rewriting the whole app is not a realistic option)


• what technologies should I use client-side ? I hesitate between leveraging a JS framework or a no-framework approach with Polymer.


• if I go for a JS framework, which one ? I had a look at TodoMVC and at first sight I'm considering React+Flux.

I hope my message makes sense. Thanks in advance for your help.

Baptiste