This is so true. The greatest gift of the transactional model of HTTP applications, where you submit your action, to receive a page for your next step, was free

This is so true. The greatest gift of the transactional model of HTTP applications, where you submit your action, to receive a page for your next step, was freeing application development out of the bind it was in: heavy client state with a myriad of small transactions triggered by events. To put it another way, when you design transactional first, you actually design a very good approach to your business layer public interface. If you do that step right, you can do the next two with minimal effort: 1. An application API; 2. Client side javascript for improving the UI of common operations. Single page applications often smell like the Windows Forms applications of old: A convoluted spaghetti of application states linked by insignificant events and event handlers, where the boundary between business logic and user interface is fuzzy or non-existent.