Comment by rchaud
4 years ago
What's an example of a bad SPA that gets people up in arms?
There's been a lot of ink spilled on the topic, but in my experience, most SPAs I run into (ecommerce stores mostly) are....fine?
Sure there's a "Loading..." content skeleton animation sometimes as the content populates, but otherwise it's perfectly usable by end users.
I recently did a qualification and we had to use an e-learning website for reading the course material and writing answers.
It was the slowest, buggiest piece of crap I’ve ever used.
Aside from the random freezes and glitches, they hadn’t bothered to implement proper URL routes so if you were in a task detail screen and reloaded the page or came back to it later it wouldn’t remember what content you were looking at and just show a blank page.
A simple templated site in PHP (or Rails if you’re feeling fancy) with a bit of JS here and there would have been much better.
The company had clearly either heard that SPAs are all the rage and demanded one from their devs who weren’t up to the task, or had it foisted on them by an agency or senior dev who again wasn’t up to the task.
Either way they’ve ended up with a thing that doesn’t work right and probably never will without a serious amount of cash or burning to the ground and starting again.
It’s an extreme example, but there isn’t a single SPA that I’ve ever used that I haven’t had to reload at least once or twice in a session as it’s glitched or got stuck somewhere.
Just because it’s possible and shiny doesn’t make it a good idea.