The pros and cons of the SPA
In this episode we discuss the rise of the Single Page Application, or SPA. From humble beginnings around 2003, it has come to be a dominant approach for many large tech companies and an alluring option for smaller startups. But for simpler web projects, are there better alternatives?
Pawel Skolski wrote this definition of the SPA in 2016. "A single-page application is an app that works inside a browser and does not require page reloading during use. You are using these type of applications every day. These are, for instance: Gmail, Google Maps, Facebook or GitHub.
SPAs are all about serving an outstanding UX by trying to imitate a “natural” environment in the browser — no page reloads, no extra wait time. It is just one web page that you visit which then loads all other content using JavaScript — which they heavily depend on."
Tom McWright recently sparked some good discussion in the developer world with his article, If Not SPAs, What? He had written before about his belief that SPAs had done little to reduce the complexity of web development, but hadn't really given readers other options. In his latest post, he tried to offer some possible alternatives.
Our lifeboat of the week of the week goes to Glortho for explaining how to add http:// to url if no protocol is defined in javascript?