The Single Page App Backlash Jul 28 2013

There have been a lot of articles recently that claim Single Page Apps are overhyped and thou shalt not build them. Ironically, even if I'm writing a book on them, I've been basically saying the same in my Single Page Apps on Rails presentation I gave a few times throughout the last years. The biggest problem with building SPA's is that this is almost always much more complex than building a standard web application based on the request/response model. Even if DHH's approach doesn't really sound that much simpler (add a lot of caching to anything and complexity can explode if you're not careful), the contrast in complexity between a simple web app with some sprinkles of javascript and a full blown Single Page App can be quite stark.

(Relevant to this, especially in the light of my Jumpstart book, is this article which describes building the TodoMVC app with Rails, jQuery and Turbolinks instead of a client side MVC framework)

But, then, why considering it at all? What's the point of all of those MVC frameworks then?

A new blog, an new day Jul 28 2013

As the first book now hopefully enters the final stage before going out of the preview phase (that's a lot of preconditions going on there), I'll start using this place to share more stuff relevant to the book with you, my dear readers.

There's a lot of stuff going on at the moment, with a strong backlash against Single Page Apps coming from a certain fraction (Let's call them the 37signal bunch) on one hand, and projects that push the SPA metaphor to the max, like hood.ie or even FirefoxOS, so there's lots and lots of things to discuss and dissect, which I intend to do mostly here instead of posting them at my personal blog.