One important question that comes to people’s mind about Single Page Application (SPA) is – “are industries deploying this application and is it really right for businesses?”. The answer is Yes and Yes ! SPA is becoming very popular on the internet and used by many industries including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and public utilities. Companies that deploy SPA model for their website put into consideration the benefits SPA renders and their goals as concerning online marketing. So, if you are considering a website whereby there will be a lot of user input and interaction, faster loading of web application, and client-side processing like calculation, then, using SPA model will be a very good idea. So far, big companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail make use of SPA one way or the other (Temple, 2014). The ability of SPA to run on a single webpage and to provide similar experience to that of using desktop application has contributed to its huge adoption these days. The shift of the web from static to dynamic web with most of the content on the internet being user-generated, coupled with the necessity to develop applications for web, mobile web, and native mobile users have also increased the adoption of SPA.
The development of many mobile applications for more of the purpose of easy access to social media has brought about an increment in the use of mobile devices. SPA has the technologies needed to support the development of mobile web which can effectively provide the functions rendered by mobile application, and as a result beginning to eliminate the need for native mobile applications. By using SPA, business process can be shared between mobile and web platforms which reduces the time to market and support consistent rules and data across mobile and web applications. A well designed single page site has the potential to deliver a consistent user experience across both web and mobile platforms from a single codebase. This allows for easy maintenance of single page sites, an important consideration when choosing to deploy SPA model for websites. The fact that SPA allows to share back-end code across both web applications and native mobile applications simplifies the testing of common business logic. This allows customers to access new features through responsive web applications while waiting for the native mobile applications to work their way through the app store approval and release processes (Meyer, 2014).
Even though SPA provides many benefits, there are few drawbacks to consider like the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the Page Linking. The former affects single page sites by finding it difficult to target distinct keyword phrases within the content of the single page site. The latter affects SPA model website in its webpage address having difficulty in reflecting the current state of the page. Nevertheless, it is relevant to mention that there are solutions to these drawbacks. According to Dan Meyer, if some measures are put into consideration during and after the development of SPA model website, a well designed single page site will be maintained, that will be free of its limitations. Such considerations are stated below:
- That SPA requires more time and tooling in browser compatibility testing to include all
supported browser types as well as variations in browser versions. Keeping in mind that JavaScript errors can have a much bigger impact on users than standard HTML style sheet bugs.
- That it is necessary to test for, de-bug and possibly design periodic full-page refreshes to reset the browser as to avoid possible memory leaks.
- That it is compulsory to educate JavaScript developers on the proper use of scope and careful use of global variables to avoid unintended collisions with other developers’ code.
- That it is pertinent to develop client-side debugging skills for event-driven code that requires a different mindset than traditional multi-page applications.
- That it is necessary to understand resource bundling, “minification” and browser caching to reduce initial page load times.
Also, with the development of new and powerful JavaScript Frameworks and other development tools, the limitations facing SPA model website are seen to be diminishing by the day. Many companies are making use of this opportunity and prefer to design their websites for their users.
Reference
Meyer, D. (February, 2014). The rise of single page applications. Retrieved from: http://www.rcrwireless.com/20140203/opinion/reader-forum-the-rise-of-single-page-applications
Temple, A. (2014). Single-Page Applications — A Growing Trend In Modern Web. Retrieved from: https://xepler.com/afterhours/single-page-applications-a-growing-trend-in-modern-web
simplysinglepage.wordpress.com 
Great post Olusola! It is not surprising that many industries are deploying SPA considering the many benefits this model provides to mobile web visitors. I agree with you on this point: “If you are considering a website whereby there will be a lot of user input and interaction, faster loading of web application, and client-side processing like calculation, then, using SPA model will be a very good idea”. This is especially true when your website visitors would not like to go over multiples pages of the site, waiting for the pages to load every time. It will be very beneficial and less time consuming if they can interact with the website and find all the relevant information in a single page load.
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Thanks for your time and the feedback, Hermine. As you stated, one of the main advantage of using SPA that is it more interactive and the ease at which you can find all information on a single page without the stress going on multiple pages like the traditional websites.
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Olusola…Very well put! Depending on what you are using SPA for, it can be beneficial for specific content that you need the user to review. Most companies use it as a landing page or a call to action page. Which as you stated a company can be deploy the landing page for both the web and mobile platform.
~ Carol
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Thanks for the added information, Carol… really appreciate it !!
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very interesting post about the Single Page Application (SPA), as we know that Single Page Application interactions can be handle without reaching server.it can improve performance in several ways like loading time, using AJAX, easy to navigate pages etc. End users will be more comfortable with Single Page Application, It is very easy to navigate to different page and filter content. but it is good to know there are some disadvantages, Client must enable JavaScript, Single Page Application build with JavaScript, So JavaScript should be enabled in client browser. JavaScript enabled in all modern browsers by default. another disadvantage can be about the security. Compare to traditional page Single Page Application is less secure due to Cross-site scripting (XSS) but the benefits is great, it can improve performance in many ways, Single time file load each of HTML, CSS, JS. Interesting post and good job. Seyed Mazar
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Thanks for your feedback, Seyed and appreciate your added advantages and disadvantages of SPA. Cheers !
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Such an informative post, Olusola! it is not surprising that SPA has become very well known and popular these days in the presence of advanced web programming languages that can help easily build one-page adequate application with all the features required to make it outstanding application. It is true that building a single page application (SPA) is more complex than building a classic app because of the fact that SPA consists of one page and tons of JavaScript, but eventually we are coming up with a model that gives a better user experience, less network consumption, and a better application architecture.
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Thanks for your feedback, Omar ! I cant wait for the new model coming with better advantages as you have stated. Cheers !
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Olusola, thanks for a most interestng and informative post. i am concerned that although there is an ‘upside’ with using SPA, there appears to be quite a downside where rankings are concerned. Given that for many small companies using local Google and other searches, the rankings and SEO are major considerations.
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Thanks for the compliment, Pat !! I really understand the concern about key content of SPA not being visible to search engine which is one of the a couple of downside associated with single page application. I want to say a lot of improvement is being made to rectify these problems. Developers are beginning to deploy some strategies like, implementing fallback pages and use of push state to fix some URL problems. Like Omar said, let’s wait for the new model of SPA that would be able to correct some shortcomings encountered so far.
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Olusola, I think it’s important that businesses understand what this can do and what it can’t do. The answer is it can do a lot and at the same time, a poor design can do very little. There are so many businesses that merely have informative websites that people want to use on their mobile devices that can benefit from this type of design. They just have to be care of the SEO issues as you have mentioned.
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Thanks Micheal for your feedback and I agree with your opinion on SPA technology.
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Great post Olusola! I agree with the points you mentioned in your post. Server side rendering is hard to implement for all the intermediate states – small view states do not map well to URLs.Single page apps are distinguished by their ability to redraw any part of the UI without requiring a server roundtrip to retrieve HTML.
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You are right Nagakalyani…! Thanks for your feedback..
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