I like the approach of having an SPA on top of a REST service back end in that you have two code bases that deal with distinctly different problems/goals, and y

I like the approach of having an SPA on top of a REST service back end in that you have two code bases that deal with distinctly different problems/goals, and you focus your attention when working on one side or the other. When you are working on the back end, you worry about security, data integrity and speed, focusing on “stateless” actions (other than what is kept in a database, perhaps). When you are working on the front end, you worry about looks and ease of use and maintaining state transitions, with a fallback perhaps of simply reloading a page + route (w/in page) if things go pear shaped. I guess speed is still an issue on the front, but caching and request count reduction seems to handle most of that. As an added bonus, I like working in an FP style in Javascript more then OOP style in Java, but that puts me in a minority.