4 ms·

Couldn't that be said of any app with a backend REST Component

• PaulHoule 5y ago
  In the 1990s there was a short period of excitement about "client-server" architectures that were supposed to replace the old mainframe apps. Ironically these were rapidly eclipsed by the first-generation web applications that worked exactly like the old 'green screen' mainframe apps. The SPA brought back the 'client-server' application but embedded in the web browser. There were many reason it was more successful in this new environment, one of them the asynchronous communication model that is required to make a web browser responsive. It's a difficult programming model which makes web browsers the domain of the biggest corporations and that so many alternative browsers such as HotJava have been doomed, but it makes it possible for browsers to show you partially downloaded pages and rarely lock up the UI. It seems like a hassle to deal with async comms in a Javascript SPA but if you were programming with a synchronous comm model you would find it very easy to get to 'hello world' but past that you'd be dealing with the window locking up, coordinating threads, etc. All stuff you get little experience with because the industry has given up on it.