Building single page applications with ClickHouse
When building real-time applications that have a rich UI, we often need to make lots of concurrent requests to a database to populate parts of the page. In order to not expose database credentials in the web browser, the common practice is to put a web server between the database and the client.
This added complexity is necessary for some applications, but it can be overkill when building single page applications, proof of concepts, and demos where users need to iterate quickly. Instead developers can consider adopting a "client only" architecture, where the browser queries the database directly. In this post, we highlight some of the key database considerations of adopting a "client only" architecture.
Single page applications that dynamically update content on a single webpage, without full page reloads by handling all rendering and logic on the client side, are particularly applicable to this approach with the aim of delivering a seamless user experience.
We'll show how this can be implemented with ClickHouse, while ensuring the database remains secure and isn't overwhelmed with requests. This requires us to exploit several simple but powerful features and reuse a few configuration recipes that can be used to add analytics safely to an existing application in minutes with just a little Javascript.
