Romaji to Kana Converter: Angular & Express — Chapter 1, Exercise 3
=====================================================================

TASK
In your own words, explain why this specific course commits up front
to a real Express-hosted conversion engine, while its two sibling
courses treat the identical client-vs-server question as something to
explore and compare within their own chapters instead.

SOLUTION

The underlying technical question -- should romaji-to-kana conversion
run in the browser or on a server -- is genuinely the same question
across all three courses in this trio. Nothing about the algorithm
itself is different in the Astro, Next.js, or Angular version; a
lookup-table-plus-edge-case function is small and fast enough to run
comfortably on either side.

What differs is each course's own real teaching goal. The Astro and
Next.js courses are both frameworks that can genuinely do either
approach natively and reasonably well -- Astro has real server
endpoints available (as its own Chapter 1 elsewhere on this site
already demonstrates for a different project), and Next.js has real
API routes built into the same codebase as its frontend. For both of
those frameworks, "should this run client-side or server-side" is an
authentic, worthwhile design decision with real tradeoffs on both
sides, so their own courses treat it as exactly that -- an open
question explored with real evidence in a dedicated chapter.

Angular, by contrast, has no backend story of its own at all -- it is
purely a frontend framework. If this course also treated the question
as genuinely open, the "client-side" answer would need no second
technology at all, and Express would never actually appear anywhere
in the course. Since this specific course's own stated reason for
existing is to give Angular a paired Express backend it doesn't
otherwise have anywhere on this site, leaving the decision open would
directly undermine the reason the course exists. Deciding up front --
real conversion logic lives on a real Express API from Chapter 5 --
is what guarantees the course actually delivers what it promises: a
genuine, complete example of an Angular frontend built around a real,
purpose-built backend service.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
----------------------------
It identifies that the underlying technical question is identical
across all three sibling courses, then explains the real, structural
reason this specific course's own decision differs -- not a claim that
server-side conversion is objectively correct, but a recognition that
this course's own reason for existing (pairing Angular with a real
Express backend) depends on that decision being fixed rather than left
open.