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It’s all about how and where you use it. Imagine a world without AJAX. This is obviously an opinion, but it would be super annoying if every button I clicked s

It’s all about how and where you use it. Imagine a world without AJAX. This is obviously an opinion, but it would be super annoying if every button I clicked sent a raw POST to the server and refreshed the page. Do news sites need to be rendered client-side with React + Redux + React Router + all the Babel polyfill garbage? No, I don’t think they do. But some sites are definitely better in my mind for being SPAs. The problem is that people pick technology that they like or are familiar with instead of working backwards from the ideal user experience. What we should be doing is picking the minimal set of technology that achieves the UX goals of a project. Instead, you have people loading 200kB of dependencies to render pages with a level of interactivity that could be achieved with 30 lines of vanilla JS. Oh, and then Google, FB, Twitter, and Optimizely tracking scripts.

adambyrtek 9y ago
One important and more subtle advantage of SPAs is that they enforce a clean architectural separation of concerns between the untrusted view layer and the backend API. This decoupling allows the frontend team to iterate quickly on user experience and run experiments without affecting the underlying business logic. This also makes it easier to build alternative interfaces (e.g. mobile apps) that share the same API. Of course these benefits matter only when building more complex applications (not simple content sites).
mratzloff 9y ago
> Imagine a world without AJAX. This is my favorite HN quote of the month.
- falcolas 9y ago
  I remember gmail before it used AJAX. In many ways, I miss that interface - it just worked. Sure, I didn't get real time email notifications, but come on, it's email. Sure, there were a lot of page refreshes, but they were super quick since there wasn't several MB of scripts being parsed and run with each load. Just some HTML with a few JS interactions. They even still offer that interface - check it out. It works remarkably well (and quickly) to this day.

adambyrtek 9y ago

One important and more subtle advantage of SPAs is that they enforce a clean architectural separation of concerns between the untrusted view layer and the backend API. This decoupling allows the frontend team to iterate quickly on user experience and run experiments without affecting the underlying business logic. This also makes it easier to build alternative interfaces (e.g. mobile apps) that share the same API. Of course these benefits matter only when building more complex applications (not simple content sites).

mratzloff 9y ago

> Imagine a world without AJAX. This is my favorite HN quote of the month.

falcolas 9y ago
I remember gmail before it used AJAX. In many ways, I miss that interface - it just worked. Sure, I didn't get real time email notifications, but come on, it's email. Sure, there were a lot of page refreshes, but they were super quick since there wasn't several MB of scripts being parsed and run with each load. Just some HTML with a few JS interactions. They even still offer that interface - check it out. It works remarkably well (and quickly) to this day.