The balance has shifted away from SPAs

• web.dev

  148 3,547 9.0 Nunjucks

  Discontinued The frontend, backend, and content source code for web.dev

  

I think it's also relevant to mention that I spent a lot of time thinking about whether web developers at large should use SPAs or MPAs. It'll take a bit of my history to explain.

I was content lead for https://web.dev from 2019 to 2021. The mission of that site was [1] to provide actionable insights on how to build better websites. We know through MDN surveys, HN discussions, Twitter, etc. that many web developers are drowning in uncertainty around how to architect their website. Which framework to use is a key uncertainty. MPA or SPA is another one. But if you've seen web developers talk on Twitter you know that these are landmine topics. If you don't handle it extremely delicately and respectfully and fairly you are setting yourself up for a tsunami of vitriol. This is 10x true for anything that the browser vendors do or say (a lot of Googlers work on https://web.dev).

So here's where holotypes comes in. When I read holotypes I see a very useful framework for understanding website architecture. And it provides a way to logically recommend SPAs or MPAs. The answer is that it depends on your use case. If you're building a content-heavy, interaction-minimal site like Wikipedia then no duh an MPA is probably the right call. If you're building a media player like Spotify though then a SPA makes a lot more sense. You can use the same logic to figure out which framework is probably best for you.

So going back to my personal history. I pitched holotypes as the overarching information architecture [2] for https://web.dev. It didn't really go anywhere. The main reason was that I was just too green as a leader/manager to push through a big change like this (or I'm just not a very effective leader/manager in general). I still think holotypes is a phenomenal way to think about website architecture and I'm honestly sharing all this to encourage someone to carry the torch and create a website that guides you through which website architecture (and framework) to use based on your holotype. Happy to chat with anyone about it further just poke around on my HN profile page to figure out how to contact me.

[1] It probably still has the same mission. I'm only saying "was" because I'm no longer on the project. I quit Google in June 2021 for a sabbatical and returned last week working on something very different, Fuchsia!

[2] https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/information-architect...

• view_component

  74 3,148 9.0 Ruby

  A framework for building reusable, testable & encapsulated view components in Ruby on Rails.

  

github uses something call View Component to render 'partials' which is a bit more sophisticated than just Turbolinks and IMO the future of complex web apps https://viewcomponent.org/

It's the right balance between React/SSR hydration and Railsy server-side apps.

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io sponsored

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• jquery-pjax

  4 16,766 0.0 JavaScript

  pushState + ajax = pjax

Ah, AFAIK that's not actually theirs but: https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax, from which Turbolinks took its inspiration as a Rails-native built in solution. Presumably GitHub never saw any reason to rewrite when the latter appeared.

• squoosh

  266 20,888 6.2 TypeScript

  Make images smaller using best-in-class codecs, right in the browser.

  

• turbo

  145 6,415 8.7 JavaScript

  The speed of a single-page web application without having to write any JavaScript (by hotwired)

  

Thanks for the link, it is an interesting and obvious way to have clearer conversations.

Multiple types have a recommendation to use "turbolinks-style transitions", which was new to me. So I did some research, and it's basically another take on "just render html, and let a framework take care of AJAX-ifying it". I've seen some attempts at this before, like the UpdatePanel's from ASP.Net Web Forms back in the 2000's.

It looks like Turbolinks itself is defunct, but has been superseded by Turbo (https://github.com/hotwired/turbo), and I only see chatter in Rails communities. It also looks like there are some other alternatives.

Are people actually using "turbolinks-style transitions"? And if so, what are you using how is it working out for you?

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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