In short: people who know me know I’m not a big fan of single page applications and everything involved in order to create them. Angular, react, vue, typescript, babel, etc… I understand how it works and what it does but at the very end all the browser does is render some HTML/CSS and execute some javascript when needed. I see no reason in using the latter to generate the former.
So today I went to a fronteers meetup and one of the talks was about SPA and how to use frontend microservices. Kudos, the speaker did mention that often a single page application is not needed. I am a strong believer an SPA is never needed: you don’t need javascript to perform the core task of your application. Good ol’ HTML gives us enough elements in order to succeed in our mission. Once we have a stable working core, we can enhance everything we want using cutting edge javascript. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I still believe in the power of simplicity that progressive enhancement provides. It makes us think about the most important functionality we need, in order for our users to succeed in doing their job.
Afterwards, some friends encouraged me to talk at one of the next fronteers meetups about why we should build the web the right way. I’ve done it before but had the feeling I couldn’t convince enough people because boring theoretical mumbo jumbo is meaningless!
Therefore, a warm call: If you can think of sites / applications that can not be built without SPA technology 1: Let me know and send me a tweet and use the hashtag 'wtspa'! That way I can try to build your idea as real examples instead for my talk.
1 Stuff like “making an application offline available” are enhancements, so please: send me real life examples!