The majority of routers for React, and other SPA frameworks, do this out of the box. This has been a solved problem for half a decade at least. A website has to go out of its way to mess this up.
That aside,
SPAs are great for a number of reasons:
1. You aren't mixing state across server and client. Single Source of Truth is a thing for a good reason. If you have a stateful backend, and your front end naturally has the state of whatever the user has input, you now have to work to keep those two in sync.
2. You need a beefier backend. A SPA backed by REST APIs is super easy to scale. nginx can serve up static resources (the JS bundle of the site) LOLWTF fast, and stateless REST apis are easy peasy to scale up to whatever load you want. Now you just have to worry about backend DB, which you have to worry about with non SPAs anyway.
3. Less languages to deal with. If you are making a modern site you likely have JS on the front end, so with SPA you have JS + HTML. With another backend framework you now have JS+HTML+(Ruby|Python|PHP|C#|...), and that back end code now needs to generate HTML+JS. That is just all around more work.
I agree some sites shouldn't be a SPA, a site that is mostly text content consumption, please no. A blog doesn't need to be a SPA. Many forums, such as HN, don't need to be a SPA.
But if a site is behaving like an actual application, just delivered through a web browser, then SPAs make a ton of sense.
1. A good server-generated-HTML backend will have no more state than a good server-generated-JSON backend. The client state is all stored in the client either way, whether in JS variables, HTML tags, or the URL.
2. A good server-generated-HTML backend doesn't do significantly more work just because its output is in HTML instead of JSON. A bit of extra text generated isn't going to increase your CPU load in any meaningful way.
3. There are only fewer languages to deal with if you aren't in charge of writing backend code. If you're in charge of the backend code, you still have to pick a backend language for your JSON API.
I think you're assuming that the choice is "SPA" or "messy stateful monstrosity". It's perfectly possible to build a RESTful HTML-based API that is as clean and stateless as any JSON API. PHP's been starting each request with a clean slate for decades.
Whenever someone says "this particular architecture is bad!" they're talking about a bad implementation of it.
The point is whether or not you're more likely to succeed at making a good app with an SPA or a multi-page site. For pretty much all brochure-styles websites and many SaaS webapps you're more likely to achieve success (for every common understanding of success) by using a multi-page architecture because they're usually simpler to implement, they work the way browsers expect things to work, and you don't need to implement some hard things yourself. You can make a brilliant SPA website for any purpose, but often people try and fail. Saying "you shouldn't have used an SPA" is shorthand for "You didn't understand or implement an SPA well enough, and now your web thing is failing to serve users as well as it should, and using a multi-page architecture would have avoided the problems your website has now."
These weekly SPA complaint threads always assume a particularly bad implementation of a SPA as well though.
Incompetency exists the most in whatever the first thing that coders learn is.
I'm old enough to remember when that was c++, then it was java, php, ruby, jquery, now it's react.
It's always a trade-off. You can build things in the "cheapest" language (whatever the first one currently is) but then you'll inevitably get the cheapest code
That's really what this conversation is about in the long arc of coding
Skills and people are a pyramid. The more competency you demand the harder the people are to find.
We have this tendency to taint the tool by the users.
Incidentally after a language or tool loses "first learned" status it generally slowly regains its prestige.
We don't assume a c++ shop is a bunch of morons any more or that using php means you write nothing but garbage. One day vue/react/whatever will lose its first language status as well and I'll be here reading about something that might not have been invented yet being a trashy bad no good idea
Ultimately the technical merits are mostly cover for a conjecture of economic efficiency. There's a reason why people aren't defending things like applications built with Go/wasm bridges - those people are expensive
I've worked in both kinds of environments, and unless you're building an offline first app, dogma, or Google maps...SPAs make absolutely no sense from the engineering point of view.
With some frontend work you can have a multi-page form just work, with the data stored in the client up until final submission, and only sending in partial checks ahead of time. This is qualitatively easier to handle, in my opinion.
It also seems extremely uncontroversial that sending data for a single item is going to require less text generation than sending over that data + the entire page.
These are all gradients, but people make absolute claims that don't hold up in these arguments.
And yet... so many SPAs feel so much slower than MPAs. They suck down MBs of JavaScript, constantly poll for more JSON and consume crazy amounts of CPU any time they need to update the page.
If you're on an expensive laptop you may not notice, but most of the world sees the internet through a cheap, CPU and bandwidth constrained Android phone. And SPAs on those are just miserable.
I also use a lot of "classic" websites where they fall over because of bad server-side state.
An example, a train reservation site, where I choose dates + a destination. The next page, it shows me some results. I decide to change the date. I hit the back button, and it falls over, cuz the state management on the server is messed up.
This happens a lot for me (this is mainly on Japanese websites), and it's extremely frustrating.
I don't like a lot of SPAs, I also don't like a lot of "classic" apps, but I do feel like SPA-y stuff at least demands less of the developers so the failure cases are a bit less frustrating for me. In theory.
And to the connections, the terrible websites with many megs of JS were likely terrible websites with many megs of HTML and huge uncompressed images before that... I don't want to minimize it (thank god for React, but old Angular bundles were the worst), just think comparing like-for-like is important.
EDIT: thinking about it more though, it's definitely _easier_ to send giant bundles on certain websites.
Given how many times this discussion happens on HN, I feel like instead of the hypotheticals, people should make a list of actual websites in both domains so that comparisons and proper critiques could be made...
An example, a train reservation site, where I choose dates + a destination. The next page, it shows me some results. I decide to change the date. I hit the back button, and it falls over, cuz the state management on the server is messed up."
any idea to not fall into a pit making an website/app/whatever?
Are those the people calling for an uber?
Are those people ordering off of doordash?
Furthermore, code splitting / lazy loading is available on many SPA frameworks so you don't have to download all the Javascript in one go.
I agree that there are many cases where managing the state in the frontend is the preferred solution. Multi-page forms add complexity for both frontend and backend. Sometimes frontend is less complex, and other times the backend is simpler.
I'll add some comments on your statements regarding backend. I'm not saying it is a better solution than managing it on the frontend for all cases. My point is that although it adds complexity on the backend, it does not necessarily mean that managing state on the frontend is simpler. That depends on the use case, but I think a lot of developers "default" to handling state on the frontend that adds much more complexity than a simple backend solution.
> "rerender previous form pages over and over again, except hidden"
In that case, you would only render hidden <input> fields with the values, and not the complete form. The code for receiving "step x" of the flow, would simply read the parameters from the request and include the values in the html code.
> "have some token to track partial form data"
Using <input> fields for this is much simpler. The final page would just read all variables as if they where posted from the same form, without requiring to generate/parse any tokens
> "build up a DB to store a partially complete form"
Most frameworks have a built in "session" that abstracts this away. It may be stored in a database, file, memory etc. If you require distributed sessions, the framework often handles this transparently by just configuring the session manager to use something like Redis to store the data.
There are modern ways to do this, see Unpoly, HTMX, livewire, hotwire, etc. You're comparing with an outdated view of what an MVC application looks like. It's like to complain about SPAs because of backbone.js
> "have some token to track partial form data"
This is called "sessions", the token you refer to can be a cookie, which is done by default for free on any MVC framework. Doing this in any other way lead to either losing authentication on page reload or security vulnerabilities (storing a token in localstorage, etc).
> "build up a DB to store a partially complete form"
Again, you can store partial data in a session, for free. As it comes by default with any MVC framework.
One of the key points here is that with any of the popular MVC frameworks you don't need to rebuild the wheel and the car from scratch as with SPA frameworks, most of these things come for free, specially anything related to forms. This is something we're not used to have in the SPA world and everyone has a different way to deal with it.
> Multi-page forms without some front end stuff
Nobody says there shouldn't be any frontend stuff, you still need it of course. If fields are static between steps you can just render every step and toggle between different set of fields using something like Alpine, no need to reload from the server. If fields are dynamic and need some kind of database lookup between steps, Unpoly or livewire/hotwire make this trivial.
Please, let's stop comparing Next.js/React top modern SPAs to 20 year's ago struts MVC, it has not been like that since many years ago already.
If you get into more than 3 pages, this isn't a great approach for various reasons, but you don't need to reach for a framework the instant you have a multi-page form.
Nowadays you have livewire, hotwire, unpoly, htmx and several other modern solutions.
Nowadays you have livewire, hotwire, unpoly, htmx and several other modern solutions.
Applications have state. In order to render and deliver the application, the server needs to have some concept of what that state is.
Doesn't really sound like an application, but a website.
In a web app it can happen that you use it for an hour without the backend doing a single thing.
> There are only fewer languages to deal with if you aren't in charge of writing backend code.
You don't have to deal with them at the same time
"text" here is as in "text/html", not as in "English-language copy".
> In a web app it can happen that you use it for an hour without the backend doing a single thing.
I would submit that this is an extremely rare case. The most involved web apps I interact with (say, Figma) are constantly syncing their state with the server. The simplest (say, TurboTax) save state as I move on to the next screen.
If you do have a case where you can pull that off, then by all means use an SPA. But it's weird to say that something isn't a web app unless it can go long periods of time without server interaction.
Generally, server interactions are arbitrary with SPAs, while SSR will happen all the time.
Going only a few minutes without server interactions in an interactive app is a big leap compared to SSR.
PS: I not only can pull that off, but I did. It's not too hard to think of apps like that. Consider e.g. Vscode
That's probably the key thing - most companies building SPA's don't really need an application but a website. There are many interesting products that need to be applications because of the functionality they need, but for every one such product there's at least a dozen that does not.
Yeah, well, from the name of it, doesn't that sound like what the Web is for?
I mean, we already have systems to run applications on; they're called operating systems.
Not only SPAs but "web applications" as a whole are a mistake IMO.
The problem with SPAs is not the technology or the architecture itself. The problem is everyone thinks, by your own definitions, they are building an "app" by default.
I've already worked for several teams which struggle to get almost anything done and everything takes ages to ship because of the fanaticism of using React for everything. God, some didn't even know you could submit a form without building a json API endpoint.
yes but it would be soul crushing for a developer
Seems even quicker, easier and "more native" to render HTML as, you know... HTML.
If this were true, you wouldn't need a REST API. I don't understand what you're trying to say here. When you make a REST call to get data, you instantly have two different sets of state: the client and the server. It's no different from SSR, it's just transmitted in a different data format (json vs html).
> 2. You need a beefier backend. A SPA backed by REST APIs is super easy to scale. nginx can serve up static resources (the JS bundle of the site) LOLWTF fast, and stateless REST apis are easy peasy to scale up to whatever load you want. Now you just have to worry about backend DB, which you have to worry about with non SPAs anyway.
You do the exact same thing with SSR. Stateless shared nothing app tier instances. Been doing it for 15 years now.
> 3. Less languages to deal with. If you are making a modern site you likely have JS on the front end, so with SPA you have JS + HTML. With another backend framework you now have JS+HTML+(Ruby|Python|PHP|C#|...), and that back end code now needs to generate HTML+JS. That is just all around more work.
You can use JS on both the frontend and backend. Or ClojureScript. Or TypeScript. I'm sure there's others. But yes, for many languages this is a potential negative of SSR.
SSR means you don't have a clear representation of the client-side state (as distinct from the presentation) - by definition you render on the server and only serve the view layer to the client, whereas your data model only lives on the server. There will naturally be state in the client (e.g. form inputs), but you don't have a good representation of that in your model.
> You do the exact same thing with SSR. Stateless shared nothing app tier instances. Been doing it for 15 years now.
OK so where does the UI state live - not the long-term persistent entities, but things like unvalidated form input, which tab is enabled, which step of an in-progress wizard the user is on? Either you manage that on the client (at which point you're halfway to an SPA, and getting the worst of both worlds), or you manage it in the application layer on the server (in which case you have all the scaling issues), or you make every UI change go all the way into the data layer which has even bigger performance issues.
If you need to persist past a reload then a few lines can save to localstorage. Anything more requires server-side calls anyway.
This magical state that can only be managed on the client-side with a heavy SPA is a myth for 99.9% of sites.
Sure, and pretty soon you've got a dozen random little copies of bits and pieces of your state, all out of sync with each other.
> Anything more requires server-side calls anyway.
The issue isn't whether you need server-side calls (ultimately every webapp needs server-side calls, otherwise why would it be a webapp at all?), the issue is whether your framework can manage client-side state between those server-side calls. In theory you could create a server-side-rendering framework that was good at this. In practice, none of the big names has succeeded, and certainly not without significant costs. (I'd argue that Wicket does this well to a certain extent, but it comes at the cost of both relatively heavy server-side session state and significantly more network roundtrips than SPA style).
> This magical state that can only be managed on the client-side with a heavy SPA is a myth for 99.9% of sites.
On the contrary, 99.9% of sites have or could benefit from having some amount of client-side state. Any time you have a stateful UI, there's a usability benefit from persisting that. Any time you have so much as a form field - like the text box I'm typing in right now - there's a usability benefit from having that as managed state (I've lost comments because I closed the wrong tab or accidentally pasted over with something else), and in cases like this there would actually be a privacy concern with doing that on the server side.
In theory you don't need an SPA framework to do that. But in practice SPA frameworks are the only ones that do it well.
SPAs don't automatically provide any state management, and often the complexity requires even more work to manage forms. This is the complaint here, taking a simple requirement and forcing a webapp into it. It's completely unnecessary.
This is a bit weird to me, in that I'd say that cuts in the opposite direction. State can exist in at least three locations for most applications: db, app server, and client. Keeping state consistent across all of them can be difficult in the best of times, but thin clients by their very nature carry less state, lessening the burden. Sometimes client state is necessary, for richer user interactions, but for all but the most cosmetic of purposes you're going to have to replicate that state on the backend anyway, to enforce business and security requirements.
This really just comes down to what you're writing, how app-like your web app is. It's too easy to have one's own experience focused in a certain area and estimate the remaining majority as relatively similar. (For most of what I personally work on, the DB portion is mostly a simple straightforward serialization of what the user has built through the application; whereas client-side state has so many aspects to it I couldn't give a brief characterization—the whole app is basically client-side.)
From what I can tell most of the disagreement about SPAs results from devs who are building things that aren't app-like railing against their futility vs devs who are, who become perplexed by the vitriol when they have immediate experience with their architectural benefits.
The SPA criticics from the article and this thread have repeatedly said that their issue is not with building things that need the benefits an SPA architecture brings. The criticism is that the majority of SPAs are harmed by that architecture because it is the industry default and being used when it isn't appropriate.
Also, for what it's worth, I've worked full-time on one of the largest SPA projects in the world (~500 engineers contributing frontend code to it on an average week), so this is not coming from a place of total ignorance.
This was not my extrapolation. But if you skim over a comment you're likely to perceive it as falling into one broad camp or another whether that's the case or not.
Anyway the point is that people write SPA's because of React, not the other way around.
Hmm, I found developing custom widgets was a joy, though the key was to keep them very small and compositional - e.g. if you want a user details widget with an address entry, it's probably best to make that address widget its own smaller widget that the user details widget just uses - and aligned with your model hierarchy. Often you end up with a parallel hierarchy where e.g. you have a user model that contains an address and phone number, so you've got a user display widget whose model is that user object and in that there's an address display widget whose model is the address field of that user object (and similarly for your edit widgets).
I tried to look up examples of what doing the same thing in Backbone.js looks like, but the search results don't seem to be about making custom widgets as I understand it. To be fair I'm struggling to find examples in Wicket as well. But I'd be interested to hear what it does better.
> And it was hard to inject new functionality into and existing page.
Hmm, what kind of functionality do you mean? I will say that again making pages very compositional was key - my team settled on a pattern where most of our pages were just a single top-level panel (so you could always reuse or embed a whole page if you wanted to) and then most panels were made of a handful of smaller panels, similar to the clean code style where you try to make each function only call three or four other functions. And then it was easy to change whatever we needed because the code structure corresponded directly to the logical business/model structure and the inheritance structure corresponded to the visual structure (e.g. we had an abstract class for what an "editing panel" looks like and all our editing panels inherited from that. So if you want to add a new field to the user model, you add it in the user model and the user display panel and user edit panel are right next to that. And if you want to change the visual design of all our editing panels, you change that in the parent component and it will apply to all of them).
What's the best intro you know to how it's components work, and the benefits and tradeoffs over other approaches?
Last time I bootstrapped a React SPA I don't think cra includes a router ootb.
As an example, look at reddit. I'm still using old.reddit.com because I can't stand their fancy SPA UI. It is so bad to the point, as a user, I enjoy a lot more HN's interface than reddit's one.
Typical scenario for SPA is to use some sort of REST API, these API:s are usually designed for general usage, not specific usage, i.e. designed to be reused between components and views thus they basically return everything of a specific model regardless if data is needed or not.
Therefore the controller queries the database with the equivalent of SELECT * on a table (or perhaps multiple tables with joins) and then exposes every field.
And in many cases one request is not enough because the common generic design of REST APIs, thus a few request more are fired that results in multiple SELECT * against the database, and eventually the equivalent of SQL JOIN is performed in JavaScript.
Already SPA solution has an increased cost by asking for data that is currently not needed, not only in the traffic between the database and the backend but also in the traffic between the backend and the frontend.
And because we want to be good REST citizens we sprinkle the JSON payload with timestamps, resource urls and pagination information and what not and in majority of cases never to be used.
Comparing that to SSR where you can fetch what you need from the database with custom SQL query (I hope you do, otherwise the SQL leprechaun will make a visit).
Just imaging how much data there is on the web that is requested and then just discarded, not even looked at.
It is possible to design custom REST endpoints for each component, but then of course what is the point of a SPA then? If you are already writing a custom REST endpoint just return HTML instead of JSON and then swap in the new and swap out the old for your component (one-liner), the end result is the same.
SQL -> (Array of) object(s) -> JSON -> Javascript (Array of) object(s) -> HTML
can therefore be shortened to
SQL -> (Array of) object(s) -> HTML
3. That doesn't make any sense, number of languages are still the same regardless.
The drawback is that the frontend now has its own schema, often it starts as a naive direct mapping of the real schema.
Thus any changes in the real schema also need to change the frontend schema and every use of it, or the mapping to the frontend schema needs to change.
Eventually these two schemas will diverge because it is not feasible that every schema change results in frontend change. Especially if the idea is to have two different teams working from either side, then the backend team can’t wait for the frontend team therefore the schema mapping will change.
And the thing is that the frontend shouldn’t be aware of how the backend schema is constructed, if the User model is separated into three different tables, because of some technical reason, that should not change how the frontend operates. The frontend understanding of what a User is shouldn’t be the same as the backends.
Therefore ideally frontend schema and the backend schema will always differ. They don’t view the world the same way.
However what you now have is a slow mapper between the frontend schema and backend schema.
The point of relationship databases is that you can view your data from different perspective by doing different SQL queries. That is already built in. But now we have invented yet another layer on top of SQL, usually in combination with the already monstrosity called ORM.
Especially in Oracle PL/SQL, I've seen this often abused to an extend where no one ever understood the whole business logic anymore (as logic was spread out in frontend, middle-layer services, and DB mumbojumo), and the database became a fragile core-piece (with a significant vendor login) and hindered all sort of future development.
Seriously, your business logic should be modelled in code, ideally in some sort of service layer (which does not necessarily mean microservices!).
That's not “abuse”. Admittedly, it's no longer an essential best practice for most systems, the way it used to be viewed, because it's more common to have a single application which fully owns the database and not to (at least in idealized theory, though very some ops staff still end up with direct access to the prod DB) allow access by other means, so in theory it doesn't tend to be necessary to avoid either circumvention of rules or (inevitably inconsistent, as well as expensive to maintain) duplication of logic.
This could be solved by only exposing stored procedures, but that just moves the code to the database server instead of the REST service with the same problems as before.
How does GraphQL make sure to respect table indexes? If not you get a super slow query.
You can get the same problems with GraphQL or stored procedures too of course, if the queries are not optimized correctly
And most of the projects I worked on in my professional career as a webdev, were replacing such workflow with a proper web application, because excel does not scale and eventually people fuckup their data.
They might not mess up history when using a standard routing library, but I've seen plenty of devs forget to add unique titles to different pages which is frustrating for a user with multiple tabs going.
On SO the accepted answer for react-router looks like "create a custom Page component with title as a prop"[0]. At work I just ask folks to use react-helmet.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52447828/is-there-a-way-...
Why would I want to keep any state on the client? What in the history of the web (the whole idea being its someone elses computer) would make it a good idea to take away the one major selling point of the web? That no matter what, someone else has the state I need, and I never have to worry about losing that if something happens to my connection. It either went through or it didn't.
99% of SPAs break history related features in some way.
Most of the users I have to deal with still have problems with double clicking.
They don't understand basic browser features.
They don't understand that they can set preferred language in their browser.
History related features are not an argument in any way.
This is so obvious that not seeing it is weird, and claiming not to see it is weirdly defensive.
I know it's supposed to be easier, but I keep seeing teams mess this up.
I think a part of this is that a lot of developers simply don't desire, want to, get to or otherwise take the time to understand the framework they are using... It has been true forever... I can't tell you how many times I've seen stuff copy/pasted from StackOverflow, by devs that don't understand what they're doing, or they add jQuery to a React application, and have goofy interactions.
The lack of understanding will always be a thing, you have to learn, most learn by doing, and when starting out, you don't know that what you are doing isn't good, but it kind-of works.
Last time I used redux, about 4 years ago, every tutorial on it demonstrated a completely different way of using it.
I spent a week piping a couple dozen form inputs through redux.
Throw typescript in there and life got more complex.
Maybe it sucks less now. But I've seen plenty of websites where every key press causes crap tons of state to get copied around because "lol const only". I've seen sites where typing takes a second per character due to mis use of redux, and the problem with redux is that it is easier to misuse than to use properly.
Often, if you have a form action button, separate from your validation, best to update state as part of on-change or isolate form state until the action button itself is pressed to push to the redux state.
But I do understand the sentiment... I've run apps, and even forms with some relatively complex and large state via redux without much issue. The biggest hurdle is often getting everyone working on something to understand how redux works, and how the difference comparison works for state changes. Also, dealing with when/where an action should be created/dispatched, how to use the thunks for async handlers, etc.
2) Servers are very fast and assembling HTML is trivial. Browsers are optimized for downloading, parsing and rendering HTML as it streams in. Using JS to write HTML after making multiple network calls is objectively slower than a single network request that assembles everything on the server close to the datastore with minimal latency.
3) Every other language is faster and more capable on the server than JS, and all major web frameworks have modern component-based UI templating. Interactions with roundtrips are just fine, and some light JS can handle most other scenarios.
> "an actual application"
That's the only reason to use a SPA, not what you mentioned.
> [...]
> 2. You need a beefier backend.
I don’t work on front-end and am trying to learn from this thread, so I may misunderstand, but that doesn’t look like an advantage to me. Doesn’t “beefier backend” imply “higher costs”?
We recently went a rewrite of our frontend for https://www.crunchybridge.com from SPA to more "basic" request response app and couldn't be happier. Previously was SPA with React and we rebuilt from scratch with request/response using Node. In places we still leverage react components for re-usable frontend bits, but no more SPA and state management.
As you've mentioned in some of your other threads on this, the state management and sync between the API team and the front end team just caused velocity to slow down. It took longer to ship even the most basic things. While we want a clean and polished experience, the SPA approach didn't really accomplish any of that for us.
The rewrite was under 8 weeks of an app that had been built up over a couple years and we quickly recouped all that time in our new found velocity.
We built a product in ~5 months with real-time collaboration, extensive interactivity, Oauth, Stripe and Gmail integrations with a standard Ruby on Rails stack.
It's rock-solid, performant, dead-simple and extremely productive to work with.
Why're we throwing away years of learning to build unstable, complex and inaccessible applications?
1. Smart people seek out difficult problems.
2. Difficult problems drive the creation of complex, niche tools, that bear cultural associations with the smart people who made and use them.
3. People who want to be smart seek out complex, niche tools.
1. Technical software problems are more fun than difficult product problems
2. Programmers would rather solve fun problems
3. Programmers end up creating technically elaborate machines to solve simple (buy annoying) product problems
I proposed to build it in Rails (which we already had, but was the "old monolith we're migrating away from") and I almost get crucified.
The more complex products are the only ones that typically have any documentation or up to date learning resources.
You want to learn how to build a thing and this is the only thing that really exists, is up to date, and works.
It may not be the right tool, but for someone new it's impossible to tell what the right tool is and people online are stereotypically obtuse and about anything tool related.
There are abundance of smart people. Wisdom, has and possibly always will be in short supply.
I'm 21 :-)
> I'm 21 :-)
No problem, you'll be young in a few years.
Low: simple good
Mid: optimized good
High: simple good
TL;DR Resume Driven Development
The way most of us would handle authorization in something like rails is a leaky abstraction, especially when we’re usually backing onto postgresql which has very mature roles and permissions.
In practice though, I've seen this backfire. You end up with the frontend team blocked because the API they need isn't available yet, and then the backend team gets blocked because they shipped the API but they can't use it to deliver value because the frontend team don't have the capacity to build the interface for it!
My preference is to work on mixed-skll teams that can ship a feature independently of any other team. I really like the way Basecamp describe this in their handbook: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/how-we-work... - "In self-sufficient, independent teams".
They generally should all be in the same team, but that often doesn’t scale.
Not having them in the same team pretty much never works well though either.
I don't know much about front-end development but I imagine you can create a front-end that is both not an SPA, and not server-rendered.
[1]: https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-one-person-framework-711e6318
Then the frameworks ballooned in size. What previously was seen as wasteful (rendering and sending HTML) started to seem pretty frugal in comparison to the multi megabyte pages. Not to mention that one could always send just page fragments.
Other than specialized apps, I think most single page applications are a mistake. Sure, some may benefit from a nice UI - say, I'm writing a 3D modeler. But most apps there are could just re-render pages. 'Refresh' is not much of a problem in an age where simple REST API calls are returning megabytes of JSON data...
As an example, I was writing a tool the other day to automate some things that have to do with quotes for my 9-to-5. Being able to add inline functionality in Django to select a customer within the quote page, or add / edit a new customer without having to leave that quote felt very 'hackish,' using the same jquery callback method used in Django Admin. My point is, this feels like very basic functionality, but turned into a whole other ordeal using traditional methods.
Agreed. For form based apps I don't like to fall back to SPAs (bloat, the desire of every dev to reinvent forms in their framework, client and server side validation duplication), and yet working with relational data they are easier.
It's one of those places where a half-way step would be so useful.
I'm guessing that Vue.js may be a good drop-in for this, but it has been a while since I have used Vue.
Even in the most simple scenarios, you quickly find your limits. If you get data back, but it's paginated (and it almost always has to be, for basic reliability reasons as much as anything else), you can't be guaranteed to have the complete set of data in a given circumstance, so you can't perform operations like filtering, pivoting, or sorting that data locally. You have to ask the server to do this for you and wait for the response, just like we've had to in the past.
> User clicks a tab. A request to server fetches the JSON data for the tab. Client renders it to HTML. User fills in some fields and clicks submit. A request to server sends the JSON form data and gets a JSON response code. Client shows a confirmation screen. ...
In this case, you're not saving much by templating JSON on the server instead of just templating HTML.
Languages/runtimes have gotten faster and more optimized, while hardware has continued to move forward. It's also far easier now to add more backend instances using orchestrators like k8s, so it's less of a big deal to have to add replicas.
I would say yes. One significant benefit of SPAs is that you can produce fairly complex applications without any server logic, only static hosting. The workload is essentially offloaded to the build process and the front-end. You still need to carefully consider the effect on e.g low powered and js-disabled devices ... but these are straightforward considerations.
That is a lot of good faith. What happens if they were not mistakes? But deliberate attempt to push Javascript as the one and only de facto approach to web development and Resume Driven Development?
I recently asked this [1],
I dont want to name names, but do any tech company actually apologise after their high evangelism to the world and industry and walk back 70% of their decision five years later?
And for some strange reason this mostly happens to Web Development in general.
If that's the main benefit, let's hear it for MPAs. I want a website that's fast, responsive, clicky, sharp and to the point - not some soft-focus pastel cartoon movie. As the author says, that's fine for audio/video sites (and reasonable for other entertainment-focussed sites) - for information sites it just gets in the way (animated elements - especially persistent ones - are a terrible idea when trying to concentrate on textual content).
For some reason, designers likes it no matter it makes sense or not, so it is what you get. The current designer trending is just a shit show, nuke the usability for nearly no benefits IMO.
But it does tend to become a hammer for every screw over time…
> I keep seeing projects that could have been written as a traditional multi-page application pick a SPA architecture instead, with the result that they take 2-5 times longer to build and produce an end-result that's far slower to load and much more prone to bugs.*
Its been frustrating seeing the webplatform not play out, seeing so little growing in to SPAs, so little maturing.
Url-based routing is heavily under-represented, tackes on only by the one or two blokes who happened to have some memory of web architecture. This clairifies the architecture both internally & externally.
As bad a problem, single page apps being stuck, forever, at single-bundle apps is phenomenally sad. Splitting bundles into chunks as a manual development task is so hard, so bad. The goal of having web based modules almost made sense, almost happened, but we rafically underinvested in transport technology, cache-digest going undelivered. I continue to think js modules, with import maps- the key tech to making modules modular- is worth it, would help make our architecture so much better. There is mild extra time to first load, but worth it/small, & cached after.
Again we're damned though. Years too late to try & see how excellent it would be to have something like react cached & AOT compiled as from a cdn. Because now privacy concern freak-outs mean this huge advantage of only needing to pull & potentially compile a js module once are gone: site-partitioning rules. We could have had better architecture, been using the language not absurd bundlers, and enjoyed high cache bit rates for common libraries. SPAs just didnt care, never tried at all, we all (almost all) did a horrible job & took way way too long (over a decade) to make modules modular g usable. There was so much hope g promise & such abaurd non-delivery, on the module front, on app archtiecture.
HTTP3 and early-hints still have some promising hopes for accelerating our transports, making "just modules" a possibility & fast, without careful hand optimization. We could still do more to optimize bundles, have automated tools that analyze up front versus on-demand dependency bundles, build http bundles of these. But i hope eventually itcs mostly not super necessary to build webpackage (nor far worse, webpack) bundles.
SPAs still have great potential. More so, now that we finally have some support tech for modules forming.
I wouldn't recommend newer generation of developers to build traditional web apps, let alone use jQuery.
I don't understand why people think we're still in the age of form submissions and blog posts - There has to be a good majority of us here that has worked on something complex that required SPAs here, no?
Not only would it be detrimental to a young developer's career to suggest avoiding SPAs in regards to hiring, but only limiting that developer to create blog post styled content is severely restraining.
Let them develop their blogs in SPAs, at least when they are needed to go into something a bit more complex, they at least have the foundational knowledge required to move towards that.
What you're suggesting is to learn two things, (one that is inevitably being phased out), and spend the mental effort to discern when to use either one, when the more beneficial alternative is to learn SPAs and just go with it.
No 18-25 year old is trying to make a Weblog where walls of text is the main content - Youtube shorts, instagram reels, tiktoks and all these bite sized content has done a great job at destroying that level of attention span.
They're going to be building something else, something quick and visual, something pleasing to the eyes - and more often than not, it's going to require a SPA.
Because we are.
> There has to be a good majority of us here that has worked on something complex that required SPAs here, no?
No. Because complex stuff doesn't require SPAs.
You can still create a something complex without using any of the common SPA techniques, instead you can use things like Hotwire, Livewire, htmx instead.
and although I find it intriguing that hey.com is using Hotwire, it's still insignificant compared to some SPA framework's ecosystems.
Performance isn't an end all be all, otherwise we should make another article and say "Python and PHP was a mistake for web servers"
There is some give to be had for the sake of practicality.
Prefer the writing of an SPA or serverless MPA.
If you consider that native desktop and mobile applications are siloed applications that coordinate with an API to achieve tasks - this is basically how SPAs or serverless MPAs work.
Part of the reason this is effective is because of the low cost nature of deploying applications like this.
For example; I can write a calorie counter that stores records in the client via indexeddb.
Given all the work is processed on the client, using an http server would be an unnecessary maintenance burden as it would simply server static files.
Rather than host the web application via a self managed http-server, I can just put my html files on S3 making hosting it free and unmanaged.
Should I decide I need to add user accounts and cloud storage - well I can then create a backend that exposes API endpoints to facilitate the tasks.
Those endpoints are then compatible with native applications, should I decide to write native mobile and desktop variations of my web application.
Furthermore, with Web Assembly expanding to offer the ability to write web applications using languages like C++, Rust, C#, Golang and the browser expanding access to OS subsystems like filesystem access - what we are seeing is that the browser is becoming a sandboxed UI toolkit, much like GTK or QT (except without native styling).
If there was anything that would empower Linux Desktops to be compatible with productivity software - it's progressive web applications.
Consider that Photoshop and Office are accessible on Linux via web today.
I mainly work in the world of database-backed websites and applications, where going client-only without a backend isn't an option.
Never used Photoshop, but Office on the web still sucks compared even to native MS Office.
As soon as you need authentication, showing data across users, allowing visitors to see shared data, perform validation of inputs, send notifications when other user action happens, etc you're back in SPA hell.
If you were to write an Android application that featured Authentication, would you also be in "app development hell"?
Languages, performance and UI decorations aside - it's basically the same thing, no?
i think what it comes down to is if you have to make a decision of "should i build an SPA?" the answer is no. the web is good at doing pages. if your app has pages, use the web's default page mechanism.
and i don't say this as a hater of single-page apps. i love webapps, and i think that building a webapp should be the default for most cases. there's a lot of apps that don't naturally break into a "page" metaphor, and all the technologies that are part of the single-page app concept are great for those cases.
figma is a perfect example, because there's no obvious division between what would be one page versus another. it's not a paginated website that has been built as an SPA, it's literally just one page that has a whole bunch of interactivity.
I think really clean, performant SPAs can definitely be written and I think the overall experience of using a SPA can be much better than a multi-page site if the task at hand requires it.
There should be two parts of the web now really: * Traditional multi-page websites * SPAs that could have been a native app on the device, but are much more accessible in web form and without requiring an install
SPA have lots of advantages: fewer languages to learn, easier to deploy, etc.
The two examples you give are only true if you don't have a backend at all. As soon as you have a backend, you're back to having to pick a backend language and deploy a backend server.
If your app doesn't need a backend, then I'd agree that an SPA is the way to go.
All pages are SPAs. I mean, page A is SPA, page B is another SPA and page C is another SPA.
Would I use jQuery if I redid it today? No. But this app does prove to me that progressively-enhanced HTML is a valid path to an app today, it doesn't need to be an SPA.
I keep seeing projects that could have been written as a traditional multi-page application pick an SPA architecture instead, with the result that they take 2-5 times longer to build and produce an end-result that's far slower to load and much more prone to bugs.
Inevitably none of these projects end up taking advantage of the supposed benefits of SPAs: there are no snazzy animations between states, and the "interactivity" mainly consists of form submissions that don't trigger a full page - which could have been done for a fraction of the cost (in development time and performance) using a 2009-era jQuery plugin!
And most of them don't spend the time to implement HTML5 history properly, so they break the URLs - which means you can't bookmark or deep link into them and they break the back/forward buttons.
I started out thinking "surely there are benefits to this approach that I've not understood yet - there's no way the entire industry would swing in this direction if it didn't have good reasons to do so".
I've run out of patience now. Not only do we not seem to be learning from our mistakes, but we've now trained up an entire new generation of web developers who don't even know HOW to build interactive web products without going the SPA route!
My recommendation remains the same: default to not writing an SPA, unless your project has specific, well understood requirements (e.g. you're building Figma) that make the SPA route a better fit.
Don't default to building an SPA.