31–40 of 637 posts
The problem with SPAs is that they have been misused and overused, at least in Italy. Tons of projects built with SPA in which we have to re-implement basic browser features like the back button, just because project manager has no idea of how this technology works. I've worked on at least 4 projects which could be written in Nextjs in half of the time
I think one of the unsolved problems of client-side interactivity on websites is how difficult it is to add it just a little bit of extra client-side functionality to a traditional server rendered website. For example, recently I had to deal with photo uploads on a Rails app, which works fine out of the box at first, until you want to show progress bars and uploaded previews etc. Then you add a couple of client-side…
The problem with SPAs is that they have been misused and overused, at least in Italy. Tons of projects built with SPA in which we have to re-implement basic browser features like the back button, just because project manager has no idea of how this technology works. I've worked on at least 4 projects which could be written in Nextjs in half of the time
I recently wrote a site to track Apple-silicon-native audio software. It works great as an MPA. It's fast, organized, and easy to use.
And the first thing someone offered as a suggestion was: "Why don't you use https://www.sanity.io/ for the content and nextjs or gatsbyjs for the front end?"
I can't even.
I hate SPAs. I would never do another SPA again if it were up to me. It just adds too much mental context switching and overhead. I can develop fully server-side apps that are lighter, run faster, and at least 20% less development effort (I actually compared that for the same task: https://medium.com/@mustwin/is-react-fast-enough-bca6bef89a6 ). So why would I ever do an SPA again if it were up to me? I would use http…
Indeed: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
SPAs are a pattern that's been applied too broadly IMO, but it's going a bit far to call them a mistake. The aims of an SPA are pretty noble - the idea of essentially removing the network round trip when a user clicks on something is not a bad one. It means things are faster, they work if your connection is flaky, they can do things like offline support. Those are good features. They might not be actual requirements…
> the idea of essentially removing the network round trip when a user clicks on something is not a bad one. Practical SPA's have many more network roundtrips than the equivalent server-rendered web interface. Every AJAX request is an extra roundtrip, unless it can be handled in parallel with others in which case you're still dependent on the slowest request to complete. With SSR, you can take care of everything with…
SPAs are a pattern that's been applied too broadly IMO, but it's going a bit far to call them a mistake. The aims of an SPA are pretty noble - the idea of essentially removing the network round trip when a user clicks on something is not a bad one. It means things are faster, they work if your connection is flaky, they can do things like offline support. Those are good features. They might not be actual requirements…
> the idea of essentially removing the network round trip when a user clicks on something is not a bad one. Practical SPA's have many more network roundtrips than the equivalent server-rendered web interface. Every AJAX request is an extra roundtrip, unless it can be handled in parallel with others in which case you're still dependent on the slowest request to complete. With SSR, you can take care of everything with…
A webapp where state can exist in various components is a perfect fit for SPA-s. Clicking a button in a widget and submitting the page with every other state, updating them and refreshing the page makes no sense.
SPA-s also help with separating frontend and backend development, they are different beasts. I know many backend devs who wouldn't touch frontend with a 10m pole and not because of JavaScript, but because they don't like design and UX in general.
I'm not clear why the author thinks that "media sites, really" are the only SPA use case. Have they never used webmail (like GMail), map apps (like Google Maps), or social networks (like Twitter)?
This article seems to be directed at dealing with people that use SPAs to make more content focused websites, which quite obviously are better made with the browser. However, for an application with a persistent UI, I fail to see how constant page loads and navigation just because "the browser can do this" make any sense at all. Even the example is a bit silly - SPAs that should be SPAs don't really have "links" per…