Comment by westoncb
4 years ago
> but for all but the most cosmetic of purposes you're going to have to replicate that state on the backend anyway, to enforce business and security requirements.
This really just comes down to what you're writing, how app-like your web app is. It's too easy to have one's own experience focused in a certain area and estimate the remaining majority as relatively similar. (For most of what I personally work on, the DB portion is mostly a simple straightforward serialization of what the user has built through the application; whereas client-side state has so many aspects to it I couldn't give a brief characterization—the whole app is basically client-side.)
From what I can tell most of the disagreement about SPAs results from devs who are building things that aren't app-like railing against their futility vs devs who are, who become perplexed by the vitriol when they have immediate experience with their architectural benefits.
> From what I can tell most of the disagreement about SPAs results from devs who are building things that aren't app-like railing against their futility vs devs who are, who become perplexed by the vitriol when they have immediate experience with their architectural benefits.
The SPA criticics from the article and this thread have repeatedly said that their issue is not with building things that need the benefits an SPA architecture brings. The criticism is that the majority of SPAs are harmed by that architecture because it is the industry default and being used when it isn't appropriate.
I get that that's the biggest problem, but there are plenty of people in the thread talking about how they're a bad idea in general (including the comment I was replying to)—which incidentally lines up with the (apparently) clickbait title "SPAs were a mistake".
For the record, I was making a general point about one of the tradeoffs with an SPA vs MPA, not making the claim that MPAs are universally better than SPAs for all use cases. I think most reasonable people can agree that there are places where SPAs are called for and places where they're not. It's the ambiguous cases that draw the conflict, and psychologically the anti-SPA people focus on the really shitty ones and the pro-SPA people focus on the use cases that would be impossible in an MPA.
Also, for what it's worth, I've worked full-time on one of the largest SPA projects in the world (~500 engineers contributing frontend code to it on an average week), so this is not coming from a place of total ignorance.
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That’s the thing, they are a bad idea in general because, in general, people ARE building things that don’t benefit from an SPA article. You’re the one extrapolating that they are saying ALL SPAs are bad.
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