> What are your opinions on SPAs? I think that some of them make sense, but many many many would be better implemented as RESTful apps instead. Once the REST

> What are your opinions on SPAs? I think that some of them make sense, but many many many would be better implemented as RESTful apps instead. Once the REST layer is written and works without JavaScript, implementing an enhanced version which requires JavaScript and minimises redownloading of new data is relatively easy. Imagine a chat app. The pure-HTML version could serve a chat message at /chats/{partner}/{message-id}, with a prev link to the previous chat; it could serve a chat sequence at /chats/{partner}/{message-id}?history={length}; it could redirect /chats/{partner} to the most recent message in a sequence. A form could easily enable POSTing a new message to the chat. Once all that's done, it's dead-easy to write some JavaScript which ties it together in a single-page app. Instead of requesting each message as text/json, the JavaScript client could accept application/json (or another format, if you like). It could subscribe to a WebSocket or server events. It could do anything — but the basic HTML-based app would still work, and be usable from a command line, from a simple phone, from anywhere.