The web world has evolved a lot with newer technologies. In the earlier days, browsers were much less capable than today. The JavaScript performance was poor & every page was coming from a server. Every time you clicked something on the browser, a new request was sent to the server and it subsequently loaded the new page. This made the whole process ever so slow that people lost interest.
Enter the Single-page application (SPA)! A new gen website design approach where each new page’s content is served not from loading new HTML pages but generated dynamically through the ability of Javascript to manipulate the DOM elements on the existing page itself.
Today, many IT companies in Kochi like Cedar Software Technologies are building apps as a single page application hyped by modern frontend JavaScript frameworks like React. In this you load the application code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) only once, and when you interact with the application, the JavaScript intercepts the browser events. Instead of making a new request to the server which then returns a new document, the client performs an action on the server. The page which the user sees, behaves more like a desktop application and it is never completely wiped away.
JavaScript is used to build SPAs or they are at least compiled to JavaScript and work in the browser. Even though the technology is always the same, the philosophy and some key components of how the SPA works are different.
Some famous examples of Single Page Applications are:
- Gmail
- Google Maps
- Google Drive
Single Page Application – Advantages & Disadvantages
- You can have instant feedback with SPA as you don’t have to wait for the client-server communication to happen, and for the browser to re-render the page.
- Any kind of UX improvement can be done here much better than the traditional workflow.
- The server will consume less resources because you can focus on providing an efficient API instead of building the layouts server-side.
- You can completely reuse your existing server-side code if you also build a mobile app on top of the API.
- SPAs are easy to transform into Progressive Web Apps. This helps you to provide local caching and to support offline experiences for your services.
- SPAs are best used when there is no need for SEO like apps that work behind a login.
- When working in teams SPAs are just great! Backend developers can just focus on the API, and frontend developers can focus on creating the best user experience
Disadvantages
- Search engines, still find it difficult indexing sites built with SPA approach rather than the traditional server-rendered pages.
- Single Page Apps running on low power devices may have less speed as they rely heavily on JavaScript.
- Some of your visitors might just have JavaScript disabled, and you also need to consider accessibility for anything you build.
To know more on SPAs and try the new approach to web designing get in touch with us at Cedar Software Technologies, leading Web Development Company in Kochi.