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You probably don't need a single-page app

journal.plausible.io

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Re: You probably don't need a single-page app

#281

Post by whitepoplar »

Scarbutt wrote: post #183
save_ferris wrote: post #26

This. So much this. My company (4,500+ people) ordered all products in their portfolio (~12 web apps) to migrate to SPA front ends about a year ago as a way to stand out from our competitors, and boy has it been painful. Prior to that initiative, we had been using the hybrid approach mentioned in this piece, embedding SPAs only where necessary and sticking to SSR everywhere else, which worked really well. Since the a…

Not contradicting you, but how did you evaluated that the SPA is not bringing any value to the customers? It may make work harder for you, it may cost more, but maybe that cost is rightfully justified from a business perspective.

As a consumer of SPAs all across the internet, all I seem to get is a bunch of janky, slow, bloated, buggy experiences. Server-rendered views just seem more performant and reliable when done well.

Re: You probably don't need a single-page app

#282

Post by rhizome »

save_ferris wrote: post #26

This. So much this. My company (4,500+ people) ordered all products in their portfolio (~12 web apps) to migrate to SPA front ends about a year ago as a way to stand out from our competitors, and boy has it been painful. Prior to that initiative, we had been using the hybrid approach mentioned in this piece, embedding SPAs only where necessary and sticking to SSR everywhere else, which worked really well. Since the a…

I'd love to hear some trench stories where these kinds of initiatives to increase the complexity of (what appear to be core) business tools were met with what I'll call a "simplicity advocate," who carried the day and the complexity was tempered, if not rejected.

Re: You probably don't need a single-page app

#283

Post by rhizome »

marktangotango wrote: post #136
save_ferris wrote: post #26

This. So much this. My company (4,500+ people) ordered all products in their portfolio (~12 web apps) to migrate to SPA front ends about a year ago as a way to stand out from our competitors, and boy has it been painful. Prior to that initiative, we had been using the hybrid approach mentioned in this piece, embedding SPAs only where necessary and sticking to SSR everywhere else, which worked really well. Since the a…

I don’t disagree here at all, but I would note that generally server side templating is often a mish mash of business logic, view logic, accessing query string and session parameters, and whatever server side Singleton/globals available in the template context, that becomes horrific spaghetti in no time at all. Compared to client side rendering discrete web requests with minimal templates; you usually get much better…

These problems appear largely academic to me.

Re: You probably don't need a single-page app

#284

Post by jon-wood »

tyingq wrote: post #50
jtdev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t imagine that the Google Play Store is a huge revenue generator, relatively speaking of course.

$24.8 billion in 2018[1]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/444476/google-play-annua...

That’s much higher than I’d have expected. I wonder how much of it comes from games and their in app purchases, a segment that is unlikely to take much of a hit from moving other apps to the web.

Re: You probably don't need a single-page app

#285

Post by a_wild_dandan »

scarface74 wrote: post #279
a_wild_dandan wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I would rather over-engineer a bit now to make feature additions trivial & rewrites unnecessary. Different stroke for different folks, I guess.

But you don’t know what features you may need or whether the abstractions will make sense until you have two or three examples.

Definitely, which is why I leave room for those unknowns with a some preemptive over-engineering. Worst case, those (well-known, general, popular) abstractions don't get used and the project works. Best case, they really save my butt and the project works. Worth it either way, imo!

Re: You probably don't need a single-page app

#286

Post by MarvelousWololo »

fma wrote: post #82

So, a question coming from a guy who's been doing Java backend processing for a long time and thinking of making a side project. Was going to go the Angular route, but I'd like to have good SEO. I'd also like to get a POC/MVP up and running to build momentum...don't want to waste time on the front end when it's basic form submissions to kick off data processing. To show how long it's been since I've done front end...…

A couple of weeks ago I tried the official Angular tutorial on SSR and found it super difficult. If you're willing to give React a try I would choose Next.js. It's pretty much a Node.js web framework that uses React for its views and has SSR out of the box. It has client side routing, so smooth page transitions, it was also fairly use to style the app with good ol css or sass. Ping me if you have any questions.

Re: You probably don't need a single-page app

#287

Post by MarvelousWololo »

MarvelousWololo wrote: post #286
fma wrote: post #82

So, a question coming from a guy who's been doing Java backend processing for a long time and thinking of making a side project. Was going to go the Angular route, but I'd like to have good SEO. I'd also like to get a POC/MVP up and running to build momentum...don't want to waste time on the front end when it's basic form submissions to kick off data processing. To show how long it's been since I've done front end...…

A couple of weeks ago I tried the official Angular tutorial on SSR and found it super difficult. If you're willing to give React a try I would choose Next.js. It's pretty much a Node.js web framework that uses React for its views and has SSR out of the box. It has client side routing, so smooth page transitions, it was also fairly use to style the app with good ol css or sass. Ping me if you have any questions.

Oh I forgot to mention: if you're doing this just so you could learn modern JS then rolling your own solution is all fine. Other than that I would avoid this at all costs.

Re: You probably don't need a single-page app

#288

Post by simple_phrases »

phkahler wrote: post #86
simple_phrases wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native apps allow Google to collect much more information than they can via the browser. They also allow for a wider range of advertising opportunities.

Except for people who won't put up with advertising in native apps.

Adblocking on phones requires infinitely more hoops to jump through than using a browser adblocker does.

Re: You probably don't need a single-page app

#289

Post by superkuh »

tyingq wrote: post #8

I'm more interested in the future of "you probably don't need a native app" . It feels like browsers are closing the gap pretty well with things like IndexedDB, offline features, WASM, etc. Still a ways off, but seems like it's getting there. I do worry, though, that it's not really in Apple's or Google's best interest to move that along.

As browsers close the gap they simply become the OS but slower, more abstracted, and with less security. And they stop being good browsers. It's the old emacs situation come round again.

The only positives are to corporations and institutions with profit motives to decrease dev time and increase ability to spy on users and extract rent from them.

Re: You probably don't need a single-page app

#290

Post by ibty »

Twirrim wrote: post #79
kyledrake wrote: post #67

Agree with the article. I find server views to be substantially easier to work with. But more importantly, I also find server view rendering to be a faster, better UI experience. It's really frustrating having to wait several seconds for a SPA to load, or to have unexpected behavior when clicking the browser back button, or failing completely because some random hunk of JS garbage errored out, and it's one of the big…

With gmail: Move your mouse pointer down to the lower right corner of the tab. Do a forced refresh (Ctrl+f5) and you'll see some text pop up while it's loading, one of which is a link to a basic HTML version of the site. Click on it and you're back to what appears to be almost the original gmail interface. Up the top of the page you'll see an option to make it default. It's super fast. Almost absurdly so, compared to…

There is a direct link to access basic HTML version of GMail : http://mail.google.com/mail/h/
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