Single Page Application. Definition, Strengths and Weaknesses

Single Page Application

You are in a single page application if an application or website has complete features.

This type of application is usually known as a compact application and tends to be lightweight. As a result, this application results in improved performance and a more dynamic user experience.

What does this app look like? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Check out the details here.

What Is A Single Page Application

Single Page Application

Single page application (SPA) according to MDN Web Docs is a web application implementation that contains only one web document.

This document updates the contents of that single document via JavaScript APIs like XMLHttpRequest and Fetch when different content is displayed.

Facebook, Google Maps, Gmail, Twitter, and Google Drive are some examples of applications that use a web implementation like this.

Angular and React are frameworks that many developers use to create efficient and fluent SPAs.

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Single Page Application Advantages

Single Page Application

According to Bloomreach, there are many benefits of using SPA. Starting from improving application performance and consistency, as well as reducing development time and infrastructure costs. Here are some of the advantages.

1. The site loading time is much faster

After loading the initial page, the SPA server does not send you any more HTML. You have downloaded it at the beginning.

Then, when you click on something, SPA will send back a request for data and markup.

Next, the server retrieves the required raw materials.

After that, the browser will pick it up and build an updated UI. This process is an exchange of parts without the need to refresh the page.

This quick exchange makes SPAs especially useful on pages that are highly navigable and use an iterative format.

2. No additional queries to the server

A server on a single page application does not need spending time and energy to load a full page.

Thus, SPA reduces the impact on the server as a whole.

This means you can save costs by using fewer servers for the same amount of traffic.

3. Fast and responsive front-end

Along with faster performance times, single page applications also allow developers to build a much faster front-end.

This is due to the separate SPA architecture between the back-end services and the front-end displays.

With a separate setup, you can build, deploy, and experiment with a front-end completely independently of the underlying back-end technology.

You can design the look and feel of the user experience you want, and then pull in content, data and functionality through the service.

4. Improve user experience. (user experience)

A single page application has many functions built as a modular service (micro service architecture) which can be updated independently.

So, you can more easily experiment with how the application is displayed and used.

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Weaknesses of Single Page Application

SPA places a significant load on the browser. For example, if a user has a low power device, they will have a poor app experience in terms of speed.

This is because the application can run for a long time, in contrast to MPA, where the page life is calculated in minutes.

One more drawback is users can disable it on their device. So, you need thinking of additional ways how they can access information in the application without JavaScript.

So, those are the things you need to understand about single page application. Apart from SPA, you can also use a multi-page application (MPA) or a progressive web application (PWA).

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