You Can't Build Interactive Web Apps Except as Single Page Applications... And Other Myths

submited by

Style Pass

2024-09-23 14:30:03

I often encounter discussions on Reddit and YCombinator where newer developers seek tech stack advice. Inevitably, someone claims it’s impossible to build a high-quality application without using a single-page application (SPA) framework like React or AngularJS. This strikes me as odd because, even before the SPA revolution, many popular multi-page web applications offered excellent user experiences.

Two years ago, I set out to build an observability platform and chose to experiment with a multi-page application (MPA) approach using HTMX. I wondered: Would a server-rendered MPA be inadequate for a data-heavy application, considering that most observability platforms are built on ReactJS?

The perception that MPA page transitions are slow is widespread—and not entirely unfounded—since this is the default behavior of browsers. However, browsers have made significant improvements over the past decade to mitigate this issue.

To illustrate, in the video below, a full page reload with the cache disabled takes 2.90 seconds until the DOMContentLoaded event fires. I recorded this at a café with poor Wi-Fi, but let’s use this as a reference point. Keep that number in mind.