Eric Brehault: Second Guessing the Single-Page-App Pattern

SPA (Single Page App) is about providing an entire app by exposing a single physical web page containing an enormous javascript bundle. It breaks the original web paradigm in many ways. Surprisingly enough, we invest a lot of efforts to mimic the regular web behaviour.

Isn’t it time for modern frontend to reconsider the SPA approach?

[Note: Eric presented by using a projector to show his slides on a black Plone conference T-shirt. :-)]

Why are we doing this? Originally we always requested a whole page and this was considered slow. But we have good bandwidth now. And if you don't have good bandwidth, the super big bundle is not good either.

With SPA we try very hard to bring back the original working of the page, especially the browser history, being able to browse and then share the link to the current page.

To mitigate problems, we created an enormous stack. And we deny the complexity. New tools create new problems, even when their individual creators does not see the complexity.

"SPA isn't stable or efficient." But there is no way back. For example, you cannot create Google Docs with server side rendered pages. Web 2.0 is 15 years old. It is still about content.

SPA is separation of concern, which is a good principle. But we mix the browser layer (how you get and view the page) and the content layer (the page content).

It seems a take it or leave it situation: either use SPA or don't. What do we want? We want proportionate complexity. Do we need 100 percent SPA?

You can use micro components, see for example the demo of Maik Derstappen in the lightning talks on Monday, using Svelte. Micro frontend is bigger than that. It is a part of the application, that you develop separately. For example, you could do the Plone Sharing page like this.

Can we compile each page separately? Then each page is an app.

ES6 native support would be interesting. Combine with HTTP/2 and you need no bundles. Bundling is the most brutal thing ever. Horrible. Get rid of it.

Respect the layers. SPAs are monolithic. Break them down.

We should have a generic browser layer, common to many different use cases, for example for logging in. I don't want to code that, but plug it. Second step: push this layer to the browsers themselves.