Currently, in the digital era, customer-centricity is vital for a successful business. In the year 2000, the average attention span is 12 seconds, fast forwards 15 years later that amount has been decreased to 8.25 seconds, causing businesses to find new ways of providing a better experience to grab the attention of customers.
Many organizations have started to build parts of their web application using Single Page Applications, Single Page applications can be found in popular apps that are being used in our daily lives such as Facebook, Google, Gmail, GitHub, and more.
A single page application is a single page that doesn’t need to reload the page while continuously responding to the user's action by rewriting its content on the current page. The dynamic display of the content on the same page created a smooth and natural user experience. This gives the user experience like he is scrolling the mobile phone vertically but not limited to mobile phones only.
The page loads more faster than regular web applications, this is so as it only needs an initial request and load of HTML at the first request. Unlike traditional web apps that need to load the pages which include the rendering of the menu, sidebar, etc each time upon request SPAs change its content dynamically by requesting data.
SPAs provide an experience the swiping vertically on a mobile device on any mobile device. Users don’t need to wait and watch new pages to load as users can just scroll down for new content giving seamless transition making the experience much better. In addition, due to the lack of need in constant sending of HTML thus causes lesser bandwidth.
SPAs allow the implementation of advanced features as everything is on a single page, unlike multi-page applications which require total page reloading to perform checkups and analysis of the effect of the feature on the page. All these make SPA easier to monitor network operations and investigate page elements and associate elements.
Using cache the application only needs one request then it will store all data transmitted for displaying content. During times where users have poor connectivity, users will be able to use the app and able to see the contents of the app since it is already cached.
SPAs use javascript and download data based on the request from the client-side. As SPA only contain a single page and doesn’t contain multiple unique URL effects it is hard to optimize search engines since it cant be scanned by search bots, this causes disadvantages when ranking on search engines
For SPAs, most of the task is done by the browsers making it taking much of the resources from the web browsers as such the web browsers needed to be at the latest version to support all the latest features without a hinge.
SPAs are more prone to cross-site scripting (XSS) when compared to multi-page applications. This vulnerability is due to the developers not being careful on what data is contained on the initial page load as SPAs are reliant on the client-side scripting for their functionality to manipulate user input. This may cause sensitive data of the user to be stolen/exposed.
For multi-page applications, it saves when users jump between pages but for single-page applications, there’s only a single page the browser could only allow the user to jump to the application but not the previous state in the app as such the user has to navigate back to where the user was browsing previously.
Angular is one of the most used frameworks out there for single-page application development introduced by Google. It comes with built-in functionality that allows developers to design and control extensions clearly and succinctly for various tasks. Angular data binding features help reduce lines of code while delivering good performance. One of the tools of Angular allows the automatic splitting of codes which allows the user to run that specific code independently. In addition, the Angular framework enables SPAs to work on every platform.
If scalability and flexibility is your main concern React JS will be one of the choices for building your SPA. ReactJs comes with a Virtual Dom and Flux to assist the developers in tracking and update of parts of the module of the whole. In addition, the said before is made possible due to the establishment of a firm code base through web components which allows web applications to work on a large scaler while being less constrained.
Backbone is one of the popular single-page application development frameworks out there bringing forth high versatility and minimalistic MVC pattern bringing you familiar tools that work best on the given project. It brings tools that the developers are already familiar with to speed up the development process. Whilst so it brings forth a huge ecosystem on GitHub with many new options available
The user interface is an important part of an application, it provides a complete solution that contains an application flow. It brings forth the most efficiency during the transmission of an entire UI to the client. This improves the overall performance of the network. Furthermore, it enables a two-way data binding keeping the view and model in sync.
Vue provides the creation of interactive user interfaces. It features a small API surface that provides easy-to-use frameworks for new users. It allows users to easily start actively using it in just a few days. One of the biggest features out there is its ability to compile a component’s structure, logic, and style in a single file.