<story><title>Things to Know When Making a Web Application in 2015</title><url>http://blog.venanti.us/web-app-2015/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tspike</author><text>First of all, thanks for the nice writeup. I hate that comments tend to hone in on nitpicking, but so it goes. My apologies in advance.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If you&amp;#x27;re just starting out with a new web application, it should probably be an SPA.&lt;p&gt;Your reasoning for this seems to be performance (reloading assets), but IMHO the only good reason for using a single-page app is when your application requires a high level of interactivity.&lt;p&gt;In nearly every case where an existing app I know and love transitions to a single-page app (seemingly just for the sake of transitioning to a single-page app), performance and usability have suffered. For example, I cannot comprehend why Reddit chose a single-page app for their new mobile site.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a lot harder to get a single-page app right than a traditional app which uses all the usability advantages baked in to the standard web.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joepie91_</author><text>I fully agree with this. SPAs are for web&lt;i&gt;apps&lt;/i&gt;, not web&lt;i&gt;sites&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;For websites, you should &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; use progressive enhancement - there is no reason why you couldn&amp;#x27;t obtain the same performance gains by progressively enhancing your site with reload-less navigation. That&amp;#x27;s what AJAX and the HTML5 History API are for.&lt;p&gt;Especially don&amp;#x27;t forget that no, &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; all your clients support JS. And there&amp;#x27;s no reason why they should need to, for a website.</text></comment>
<story><title>Things to Know When Making a Web Application in 2015</title><url>http://blog.venanti.us/web-app-2015/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tspike</author><text>First of all, thanks for the nice writeup. I hate that comments tend to hone in on nitpicking, but so it goes. My apologies in advance.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If you&amp;#x27;re just starting out with a new web application, it should probably be an SPA.&lt;p&gt;Your reasoning for this seems to be performance (reloading assets), but IMHO the only good reason for using a single-page app is when your application requires a high level of interactivity.&lt;p&gt;In nearly every case where an existing app I know and love transitions to a single-page app (seemingly just for the sake of transitioning to a single-page app), performance and usability have suffered. For example, I cannot comprehend why Reddit chose a single-page app for their new mobile site.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a lot harder to get a single-page app right than a traditional app which uses all the usability advantages baked in to the standard web.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AdeptusAquinas</author><text>This is totally true.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re just starting out, chances are you are not (or should not be) making any sort of application where the performance increases by operating as a SPA will be even be noticeable compared to a standard server app.&lt;p&gt;Plus, I&amp;#x27;d argue that you won&amp;#x27;t really understand what a SPA adds (or takes away) unless you are thoroughly familiar with the traditional model.&lt;p&gt;Finally, at the end of the day traditional apps are just a lot easier to put together even compared to the latest SPA frameworks, especially if your server side tech is something like Ruby or C#. A beginner will be better served by getting something nice up quickly, before attempting to do it the &amp;#x27;purist&amp;#x27; way and possibly getting discouraged by the difficulty.</text></comment>