Why I hate your Single Page App

Why I hate your classic HTML app:

- Every click is a full page load, and you still didn't manage to get caching right, so it takes 2 seconds to load.

- When I have multiple tabs open, your badges and notifications fall out of date, because you never poll for updates.

- If I mis-enter information into a form, your error handling forgets all my information and I have to re-enter it.

- You forgot to update the styles on that rarely-used page, and now it's got half the new CSS and half the old CSS and the point is the header runs halfway down the goddamn content in Times New Roman.

I get it, there are problems with SPAs. But this perfect land of one-page-per-link has real usability problems if it's not implemented properly, and there's a lot of maintenance overhead associated with a sprawling mass of transcluded templates. If we're going to criticize an architecture because it's easy to poorly implement, I don't think "ROCA" or whatever we're calling it has any meaningful benefits over SPAs in the general case.

Some of this hits home for me. I work on the WAY DEEP backend of one of these 'modern single page apps', so dont really care about the REST apis or UI/UX. I will say our actual website is a nightmare to use and I attribute a lot of it to (A) mgmt demanding bad UI/UX on short timeframes(B) front end folks having the power to write butt loads of JS code to achieve said goals with no thought to system wide architecture / integration. We have so much shit happening each time you click to a different part of webapp, we seem to have hit the messy phase of a codebase where you cant change one part of the site without breaking something else in a totally different section of the codebase.

to be fair though, as with everything there are pros and cons. Once i learned to deal with some of complexities and crazy UI/UX, using our web app is like driving a spaceship and it does work pretty fast considering all the data getting lifted, html getting rendered etc.

but that's the point: an application isn't a webpage. An app doesn't have a concept of back and forward, it has undo & redo. It doesn't need refreshing because it's syncing with the server by websocket. It doesn't have location it has state.

> Maybe your single page app is different, but the ones that I know break most of my browser’s features, such as the back and forward buttons, page refresh, bookmarking, sending a link, or opening a link in a new window or tab.

That reminds me: if anyone out there has any advice how to make AppCache play nice with JavaScript-based routing solutions (say, react-router), please let me know.

Come on, this is clickbait as it can be with the title and the first line of the article, that's what I hate.