ROCA: Resource-oriented Client Architecture – an alternative to SPAs

This _is_ how it was for quite a while. Check out Rails as of about Rails3 or so. Unobtrusive JS, serving up partial HTML, etc.

There's a set of interactions for which this works incredibly well and a set where it falls short.

If your UX and data model support the notion of users interacting with a single resource at a time it's really effective. If you have lots of data that has effects on other data you might be displaying, or you need lots of fine grained interactions, a full client side app will probably provide the best experience.

I agree with you. However, making a great single-page app takes a lot of experience and work, a bit less so with current frameworks, but still. A lot of in-house SPAs are truly terrible, with bad performance and broken navigation, you wish the developers wouldn’t have bothered. Multi-page apps might be a bit harder to screw up as badly.

So maybe the user experience hierarchy goes something like: great SPA > MPA > average SPA?

This would mean there’s still a place for MPAs, at least with certain budget constraints.

> “However, making a great single-page app takes a lot of experience and work, a bit less so with current frameworks, but still.”

So what? Get experience. The days of a plucky developer throwing together some simple page he built over a weekend while reading a programming book and having that be good enough for millions of people around the world are over.

Users will require richer and deeper experiences and that will breed a demand for some developers who actually know what they are doing, and possess a vast experience to draw insights from.

As a UI architect I've worked on both SPAs and also ROCA-style UI quite a bit. Like everything pros and cons to both.

As a general rule of thumb I find SPAs deliver much faster, but ROCA-style solutions are much more predictable. That is, getting a modest MVP out the door with an SPA terms to be much faster, but almost always reach a critical mass of functionality at which point they become hard to maintain. ROCA-style apps don't suffer with this as much.

I don't think this experience is just down to the architecture however. I just think it asks a lot more of a software engineer to structure and maintain an SPA well. Ultimately an SPA can be a more optimal architecture for many applications because the client-side environment is an increasingly powerful VM in its own right. However, I rarely see the engineering discipline required to do it right.

I tend to prefer ROCA-style because it fits better with the web's distributed integration architecture, but in practice I find building an SPA with a resource-oriented mindset is usually a good compromise.

It depends what the app is, surely? The problem is too many things that should just be displaying a single document instead produce a bloated SPA with worse usability. Medium is probably the archetype of this.