If Not SPAs, What?

It sounds crazy to say that now but Angular became big because it was actually quite lightweight compared to other JS frameworks of this era, declarative 2 way databinding was cool, it was compatible with jQuery (thus its widget ecosystem) and it was also developed with testing in mind. So it was easy to move jQuery projects to Angular ones, and developers cared about this aspect and it helped organize code quite a bit. Angular 2 on the other hand never made sense and it was a solution looking for problem.

React and JSX came along and allowed developers to use JS classes when a lot of browsers didn't support them. And unidirectional dataflow was all at rage. It was always the right solution of course, but I never heard about DOM diffing before that which to me is the main appeal to React. To this date, HTML API still do not have a native(thus efficient) DOM diffing API which is a shame.

> When SPA's became the norm and even static web pages needed to be build with React, developing became more and more inefficient. I saw whole teams struggling to build simple applications and wasting months of time, while these used to be developed within a couple of weeks with just 1 or 2 developers, on proven server side opinionated frameworks. But that was no longer according to best practices and industry standards. Everything needed to be SPA, micro services, distributed databases, Kubernetes etc. These components and layers needed to be glued together by trial and error.

IMHO the problem isn't React and co or even SPA. In fact writing an REST/Web API should be easier than writing a server-side generated HTML website (no need for templating language, ugly form frameworks,...). The problem is the horrible and complex NodeJS/NPM backed asset compilation pipelines and build tools that these framework often require in a professional setting, which incur a lot of complexity for very little gain.

Especially since it works with every tech stack with pretty much no code changes required to your existing app. The next iteration of Turbolinks will also work for form submissions without any server side code according to what's been publicly discussed from Basecamp employees. That and partial page changes will be possible with Turblinks frames which is a huge upgrade.

A while back I made a video on the benefits of using Turbolinks and how to set it up if anyone is interested https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/improving-your-page-load-spee....

Just be mindful that Turbolinks alone isn't enough to replace a SPA. It's typically paired with Stimulus but you can pair it up with jQuery, Alpine or whatever you want when you want to do more than page transitions, form submissions and swapping content in a specific area of a page.

Native applications

Why is that easier? It's more work, you are now rendering two views instead of one, a JSON one(server) and HTML one(in the client) with all the JSON encoding/decoding that it entails. You are still using a templating language and, dealing with forms in React is more cumbersome than doing it server-side.