The future is Next.js with SSR first and selective client side hydration. Ignore the jamstack, it's going to lose and go away. Requiring a JS download first to show a dynamic site is a recipe for bad performance.
If Not SPAs, What?
11–20 of 456 posts
Re: If Not SPAs, What?
#12My argument for SPAs rests on the completely subjective yet I feel incredibly powerful impact of latency. When anything takes more than 50ms to react, it becomes mentally jarring to the user. Whether it is typing in an SSH session, clicking a menu with a mouse, auto-completing a box, etc - all these things generate a completely different human response and relationship with the application if they get below that threshold of latency. In my experience, it's nearly impossible to get non-SPAs across that threshold for large sections of their functionality, while for SPAs it becomes more or less the default. So people can make all the technical arguments they want, but to me the human factor of that subjective feeling trumps it all.
Re: If Not SPAs, What?
#13Our app (https://domestica.app/login) is a pretty good (IMO) example of a blazing fast SPA. It uses Mithril and copious amounts of chunking to make the bundle size extremely small.
Re: If Not SPAs, What?
#14> they also wholeheartedly embrace the thing everyone tries to avoid: mutable state on the server.
For most apps in Phoenix LiveView, it's probably best to think of this as a "relatively smart caching layer". Keeping state on the client invokes distributed state concens anyways, and in the case of the Phoenix, at least the VM is well-equipped with the relevant primitives to make distributed state easy, especially. Basically the only cost you have to pay is if latency is a big deal, you are making a trip back and forth to the server, which could be 100s of milliseconds or more in bad situations... Or even really bad situations, like driving under a tunnel, or being in some stretches of subway.
Re: If Not SPAs, What?
#15I think Phoenix Live View is maybe the most compelling story around this ( https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view ). I'm moving a side-project from React/SPA to Phoenix live view and it's kind of amazing to get the dev ergonomics of a server-rendered page with the UX benefits of a SPA. This course is a pretty great intro: https://pragmaticstudio.com/phoenix-liveview
Agree completely. My only concern is that so many imitations are attempting to pop up in other languages and you just can’t do it as effectively.
There are so many tradeoffs present that happen to result in the necessary set of functionality to do this efficiently that aren’t easily present outside of the BEAM.
Re: If Not SPAs, What?
#16Our app ( https://domestica.app/login ) is a pretty good (IMO) example of a blazing fast SPA. It uses Mithril and copious amounts of chunking to make the bundle size extremely small.
while breaking my back button
nothing to do with the SPA of course
Re: If Not SPAs, What?
#17well there is also React.NET which actually can use razor pages to include react components. pretty neat. also there is blazor which works with websockets and pushes html to clients.
Re: If Not SPAs, What?
#18I used Turbolinks for the first time on a new Rails app about 2 years ago and was floored by the impact - it felt like a SPA in terms of no page loads and overall speed.
I'm convinced that this is the solution for the majority of use-cases, combined with selective usage of either React components or something like Stimulus where you need more sophisticated UI components.
Re: If Not SPAs, What?
#19The missing link, IMHO, is the lack of client side SQL and a sync mechanism. IndexDB is okay, but nobody is going to use it server side. So you kind of always have to end up writing things twice.
Re: If Not SPAs, What?
#20I used Turbolinks for the first time on a new Rails app about 2 years ago and was floored by the impact - it felt like a SPA in terms of no page loads and overall speed. I'm convinced that this is the solution for the majority of use-cases, combined with selective usage of either React components or something like Stimulus where you need more sophisticated UI components.
Is there an equivalent of Turbolinks for something like Django? Or even for MVC PHP apps?