On February 12th, SDL released DXA 2.0, the shiny new version of the Digital Experience Accelerator. Part of this new version is a new REST service called the model service, which is able to return content quicker, and in a leaner format. Not only that, the model service is also able to resolve links in the content on the fly. This is an important improvement, because link resolving is one of the most expensive operations in DXA as well as DD4T.
A full migration of your application from DD4T to DXA is far from trivial, at least not with the DXA 2.0 release that is currently out. But there is good news: it is very easy to start using the DXA model service in your DD4T .NET application (it is also possible with a Java DD4T application, but we’ll discuss that some other time). Your application is likely to become faster because of it.
There is one important condition: you have to use SDL Web 8.1 or higher, and DD4T 2.0 or higher, in order to upgrade to the model service.