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I've done some web-based projects, and most of the difficulties I've met with (questions, confusions) could be figured out with help. But I still have an important question, even after asking some experienced developers: When functionality can be implemented with both server-side code and client-side scripting (JavaScript), which one should be preferred?
A simple example:
To render a dynamic html page, I can format the page in server-side code (PHP, python) and use Ajax to fetch the formatted page and render it directly (more logic on server-side, less on client-side).
I can also use Ajax to fetch the data (not formatted, JSON) and use client-side scripting to format the page and render it with more processing (the server gets the data from a DB or other source, and returns it to the client with JSON or XML. More logic on client-side and less on server).
So how can I decide which one is better? Which one offers better performance? Why? Which one is more user-friendly?
With browsers' JS engines evolving, JS can be interpreted in less time, so should I prefer client-side scripting?
On the other hand, with hardware evolving, server performance is growing and the cost of sever-side logic will decrease, so should I prefer server-side scripting?
EDIT:
With the answers, I want to give a brief summary.
Pros of client-side logic:
Better user experience (faster).
Less network bandwidth (lower cost).
Increased scalability (reduced server load).
Pros of server-side logic:
Security issues.
Better availability and accessibility (mobile devices and old browsers).
Better SEO.
Easily expandable (can add more servers, but can't make the browser faster).
It seems that we need to balance these two approaches when facing a specific scenario. But how? What's the best practice?
I will use client-side logic except in the following conditions:
Security critical.
Special groups (JavaScript disabled, mobile devices, and others).
In many cases, I'm afraid the best answer is both.
As Ricebowl stated, never trust the client. However, I feel that it's almost always a problem if you do trust the client. If your application is worth writing, it's worth properly securing. If anyone can break it by writing their own client and passing data you don't expect, that's a bad thing. For that reason, you need to validate on the server.
Unfortunately if you validate everything on the server, that often leaves the user with a poor user experience. They may fill out a form only to find that a number of things they entered are incorrect. This may have worked for "Internet 1.0", but people's expectations are higher on today's Internet.
This potentially leaves you writing quite a bit of redundant code, and maintaining it in two or more places (some of the definitions such as maximum lengths also need to be maintained in the data tier). For reasonably large applications, I tend to solve this issue using code generation. Personally I use a UML modeling tool (Sparx System's Enterprise Architect) to model the "input rules" of the system, then make use of partial classes (I'm usually working in .NET) to code generate the validation logic. You can achieve a similar thing by coding your rules in a format such as XML and deriving a number of checks from that XML file (input length, input mask, etc.) on both the client and server tier.
Probably not what you wanted to hear, but if you want to do it right, you need to enforce rules on both tiers.
I tend to prefer server-side logic. My reasons are fairly simple:
I don't trust the client; this may or not be a true problem, but it's habitual
Server-side reduces the volume per transaction (though it does increase the number of transactions)
Server-side means that I can be fairly sure about what logic is taking place (I don't have to worry about the Javascript engine available to the client's browser)
There are probably more -and better- reasons, but these are the ones at the top of my mind right now. If I think of more I'll add them, or up-vote those that come up with them before I do.
Edited, valya comments that using client-side logic (using Ajax/JSON) allows for the (easier) creation of an API. This may well be true, but I can only half-agree (which is why I've not up-voted that answer yet).
My notion of server-side logic is to that which retrieves the data, and organises it; if I've got this right the logic is the 'controller' (C in MVC). And this is then passed to the 'view.' I tend to use the controller to get the data, and then the 'view' deals with presenting it to the user/client. So I don't see that client/server distinctions are necessarily relevant to the argument of creating an API, basically: horses for courses. :)
...also, as a hobbyist, I recognise that I may have a slightly twisted usage of MVC, so I'm willing to stand corrected on that point. But I still keep the presentation separate from the logic. And that separation is the plus point so far as APIs go.
I generally implement as much as reasonable client-side. The only exceptions that would make me go server-side would be to resolve the following:
Trust issues
Anyone is capable of debugging JavaScript and reading password's, etc. No-brainer here.
Performance issues
JavaScript engines are evolving fast so this is becoming less of an issue, but we're still in an IE-dominated world, so things will slow down when you deal with large sets of data.
Language issues
JavaScript is weakly-typed language and it makes a lot of assumptions of your code. This can cause you to employ spooky workarounds in order to get things working the way they should on certain browsers. I avoid this type of thing like the plague.
From your question, it sounds like you're simply trying to load values into a form. Barring any of the issues above, you have 3 options:
Pure client-side
The disadvantage is that your users' loading time would double (one load for the blank form, another load for the data). However, subsequent updates to the form would not require a refresh of the page. Users will like this if there will be a lot of data fetching from the server loading into the same form.
Pure server-side
The advantage is that your page would load with the data. However, subsequent updates to the data would require refreshes to all/significant portions of the page.
Server-client hybrid
You would have the best of both worlds, however you would need to create two data extraction points, causing your code to bloat slightly.
There are trade-offs with each option so you will have to weigh them and decide which one offers you the most benefit.
One consideration I have not heard mentioned was network bandwidth. To give a specific example, an app I was involved with was all done server-side and resulted in 200Mb web page being sent to the client (it was impossible to do less without major major re-design of a bunch of apps); resulting in 2-5 minute page load time.
When we re-implemented this by sending the JSON-encoded data from the server and have local JS generate the page, the main benefit was that the data sent shrunk to 20Mb, resulting in:
HTTP response size: 200Mb+ => 20Mb+ (with corresponding bandwidth savings!)
Time to load the page: 2-5mins => 20 secs (10-15 of which are taken up by DB query that was optimized to hell an further).
IE process size: 200MB+ => 80MB+
Mind you, the last 2 points were mainly due to the fact that server side had to use crappy tables-within-tables tree implementation, whereas going to client side allowed us to redesign the view layer to use much more lightweight page. But my main point was network bandwidth savings.
I'd like to give my two cents on this subject.
I'm generally in favor of the server-side approach, and here is why.
More SEO friendly. Google cannot execute Javascript, therefor all that content will be invisible to search engines
Performance is more controllable. User experience is always variable with SOA due to the fact that you're relying almost entirely on the users browser and machine to render things. Even though your server might be performing well, a user with a slow machine will think your site is the culprit.
Arguably, the server-side approach is more easily maintained and readable.
I've written several systems using both approaches, and in my experience, server-side is the way. However, that's not to say I don't use AJAX. All of the modern systems I've built incorporate both components.
Hope this helps.
I built a RESTful web application where all CRUD functionalities are available in the absence of JavaScript, in other words, all AJAX effects are strictly progressive enhancements.
I believe with enough dedication, most web applications can be designed this way, thus eroding many of the server logic vs client logic "differences", such as security, expandability, raised in your question because in both cases, the request is routed to the same controller, of which the business logic is all the same until the last mile, where JSON/XML, instead of the full page HTML, is returned for those XHR.
Only in few cases where the AJAXified application is so vastly more advanced than its static counterpart, GMail being the best example coming to my mind, then one needs to create two versions and separate them completely (Kudos to Google!).
I know this post is old, but I wanted to comment.
In my experience, the best approach is using a combination of client-side and server-side. Yes, Angular JS and similar frameworks are popular now and they've made it easier to develop web applications that are light weight, have improved performance, and work on most web servers. BUT, the major requirement in enterprise applications is displaying report data which can encompass 500+ records on one page. With pages that return large lists of data, Users often want functionality that will make this huge list easy to filter, search, and perform other interactive features. Because IE 11 and earlier IE browsers are are the "browser of choice"at most companies, you have to be aware that these browsers still have compatibility issues using modern JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3. Often, the requirement is to make a site or application compatible on all browsers. This requires adding shivs or using prototypes which, with the code included to create a client-side application, adds to page load on the browser.
All of this will reduce performance and can cause the dreaded IE error "A script on this page is causing Internet Explorer to run slowly" forcing the User to choose if they want to continue running the script or not...creating bad User experiences.
Determine the complexity of the application and what the user wants now and could want in the future based on their preferences in their existing applications. If this is a simple site or app with little-to-medium data, use JavaScript Framework. But, if they want to incorporate accessibility; SEO; or need to display large amounts of data, use server-side code to render data and client-side code sparingly. In both cases, use a tool like Fiddler or Chrome Developer tools to check page load and response times and use best practices to optimize code.
Checkout MVC apps developed with ASP.NET Core.
At this stage the client side technology is leading the way, with the advent of many client side libraries like Backbone, Knockout, Spine and then with addition of client side templates like JSrender , mustache etc, client side development has become much easy.
so, If my requirement is to go for interactive app, I will surely go for client side.
In case you have more static html content then yes go for server side.
I did some experiments using both, I must say Server side is comparatively easier to implement then client side.
As far as performance is concerned. Read this you will understand server side performance scores.
http://engineering.twitter.com/2012/05/improving-performance-on-twittercom.html
I think the second variant is better. For example, If you implement something like 'skins' later, you will thank yourself for not formatting html on server :)
It also keeps a difference between view and controller. Ajax data is often produced by controller, so let it just return data, not html.
If you're going to create an API later, you'll need to make a very few changes in your code
Also, 'Naked' data is more cachable than HTML, i think. For example, if you add some style to links, you'll need to reformat all html.. or add one line to your js. And it isn't as big as html (in bytes).
But If many heavy scripts are needed to format data, It isn't to cool ask users' browsers to format it.
As long as you don't need to send a lot of data to the client to allow it to do the work, client side will give you a more scalable system, as you are distrubuting the load to the clients rather than hammering your server to do everything.
On the flip side, if you need to process a lot of data to produce a tiny amount of html to send to the client, or if optimisations can be made to use the server's work to support many clients at once (e.g. process the data once and send the resulting html to all the clients), then it may be more efficient use of resources to do the work on ther server.
If you do it in Ajax :
You'll have to consider accessibility issues (search about web accessibility in google) for disabled people, but also for old browsers, those who doesn't have JavaScript, bots (like google bot), etc.
You'll have to flirt with "progressive enhancement" wich is not simple to do if you never worked a lot with JavaScript. In short, you'll have to make your app work with old browsers and those that doesn't have JavaScript (some mobile for example) or if it's disable.
But if time and money is not an issue, I'd go with progressive enhancement.
But also consider the "Back button". I hate it when I'm browsing a 100% AJAX website that renders your back button useless.
Good luck!
2018 answer, with the existence of Node.js
Since Node.js allows you to deploy Javascript logic on the server, you can now re-use the validation on both server and client side.
Make sure you setup or restructure the data so that you can re-use the validation without changing any code.
I want to create a mobile application for an already existing website. This application will allow users to login into their accounts, upload files, view messages etc. This app will be created using Phonegap and as much js/css/html5 as possible. My question is: Most apps I have seen so far use JSON-Responses (or similar) and work with them right in the app. But what is the disadvantage of already creating the necessary html on the server and simply loading it into a div using jQuery? (is it even possible because of Same Origin Policy?) When you want to change some minor things of the application, it is easier in this way, but there must be a reason why I haven't seen this so far...
The HTML and templates are already cached locally - so by passing JSON data instead of HTML fragments you're passing less data, network traffic is usually a limiting factor in mobile apps.
From a design point of view only asking the server for data (and not presentation logic) also makes for better separation of concerns and architecture very often. It's also easier to cache data than presentation because of user preferences and such.
On the upside - sending data will make presenting it slightly faster since less work has to happen on the client side.
As for the Same Origin Policy, it does not apply for mobile apps so don't worry about it.
So I'm afraid I might be missing something pretty fundamental here, but I really can't get my head around this - Why? Why would we want to use those JS MVC frameworks, instead of sticking with Rails, Django, PHP and so on?
What do these JS frameworks give us that can't be achieved by the old web frameworks? I read about SPA, and there's nothing I couldn't do there with ASP.NET MVC, right?
I'm really baffled by hearing all the people at work wanting to leave our current framework for these new ones, and it's much more than just for the sake of learning something new.
I am totally up for that, and I've always tried playing around with other frameworks to see what I'm missing, but perhaps these new technologies have something really big to offer that I simply cannot see?
Single page applications provide a better experience by having all page transitions be seamless. This means you never see the "page flash" between user actions, in addition to a few other user experience improvements.
Front-end frameworks also generally provide a common way to interface with APIs. So instead of writing an AJAX wrapper for every page in your site, you just say 'This page has this route (path), hooks data with this schema from that API endpoint and presents it with these templates and helpers.' There are many proponents of APIs, because there are many good reason to write you applications from a service standpoint. This talk sums up a lot of the points in favor of APIs. To summarize:
Orchestrating your web offerings as services makes them inherently decoupled. This means they are easily changed out. All the reasons behind strong Object Oriented design principles apply equally to the larger parts of an application. Treat each piece as an independent part, like a car, and the whole platform is more robust and healthy. That way, a defect in the headlights doesn't cause the motor to blow up.
This is very similar to how a SOAP WSDL works, except you have the auto creation tools right out of the box.
Having well defined touch points for each part of your application makes it easier for others to interface with. This may not ever factor into your specific business, but a number of very successful web companies (Google/Yahoo, Amazon AWS) have created very lucrative markets on this principle. In this way, you can have multiple products supported by the same touch points, which cuts a lot of the work out of product development.
As other point out, the front end framework is not a replacement for the backend, server technologies. How could it be? While this may seem like a hindrance ("Great, now we have two products to support!"), it is actually a great boon. Now your front and back ends can be changed and version with much less concern over inadvertently breaking one or the other. As long as you stick to the contract, things will "Just WorkTM".
To answer your additional question in the comment, that is exactly correct. You use a front end framework for handling all the customer interaction and a completely separate back-end technology stack to support it.
I'm forgetting a few good ones...
Angular, Ember, and Backbone are client-side JavaScript frameworks. They could be used interchangeably with a Rails, Django, or PHP backend. These JavaScript MVCs are only responsible for organizing JavaScript code in the browser and don't really care how their data is handled or persisted server-side.
Django/Rails etc are server-side MVC frameworks. Angular/Backbone etc are client-side Javascript MVC frameworks. Django/Rails and Angular/Backbone work together - in a single-page app, usually the server-side MVC will serve the initial HTML/JS/static assets once, and then once that is done, the client-side router will take over and handle all subsequent navigations/interactions with your app.
The difference here lies in the concept of what a "single-page application" is. Think about how a "regular" web Django/Rails website works. A user enters your app, the backend fetches data and serves a page. A user clicks on a link, which triggers the server to serve a new page, which causes the entire page to reload. These traditional types of websites are basically stateless, except for things like cookies/sessions etc.
In contrast, a single-page application is a stateful Javascript application that runs in the browser and appears to act like a traditional webapp in that you can click on things and navigate around as usual, but the page never reloads, instead, specific DOM nodes have their contents refreshed according to the logic of your application. To achieve a pure Javascript client-side experience like this in a maintainable fashion really requires that you start organizing your Javascript code for the same reasons you do on the server - you have a router which takes a URL path and interacts with a controller that often contains the logic for showing/hiding views for a particular URL, you have a model which encapsulates your data (think of a model as roughly one "row" of a database result) which your views consume. And because it's Javascript there are events going on, so you can have your view listen for changes in it's associated model and automatically re-render itself when the data is updated.
Also keep in mind that you don't just have one view on the client side, there are usually many separate views that make up a page and these views are often nested, not only for organizational purposes but because we want the ability to only refresh the parts of the UI that need to be refreshed.
The intro to Backbone is probably a good starter on the topic: http://backbonejs.org/#introduction
Check this article, there is well explained how a modern web application should looks like in the client side, server side and the communication between them.
By the way:
Client side -> Ember, Angular, Backbone, Knockout.
Server side -> Django, Node, Rails
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I've read about SPA and it advantages. I find most of them unconvincing. There are 3 advantages that arouse my doubts.
Question: Can you act as advocate of SPA and prove that I am wrong about first three statements?
=== ADVANTAGES ===
1. SPA is extremely good for very responsive sites:
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. This
is achieved by separating the data from the presentation of data by
having a model layer that handles data and a view layer that reads
from the models.
What is wrong with holding a model layer for non-SPA? Does SPA the only compatible architecture with MVC on client side?
2. With SPA we don't need to use extra queries to the server to download pages.
Hah, and how many pages user can download during visiting your site? Two, three? Instead there appear another security problems and you need to separate your login page, admin page etc into separate pages. In turn it conflicts with SPA architecture.
3.May be any other advantages? Don't hear about any else..
=== DISADVANTAGES ===
Client must enable javascript.
Only one entry point to the site.
Security.
P.S. I've worked on SPA and non-SPA projects. And I'm asking those questions because I need to deepen my understanding. No mean to harm SPA supporters. Don't ask me to read a bit more about SPA. I just want to hear your considerations about that.
Let's look at one of the most popular SPA sites, GMail.
1. SPA is extremely good for very responsive sites:
Server-side rendering is not as hard as it used to be with simple techniques like keeping a #hash in the URL, or more recently HTML5 pushState. With this approach the exact state of the web app is embedded in the page URL. As in GMail every time you open a mail a special hash tag is added to the URL. If copied and pasted to other browser window can open the exact same mail (provided they can authenticate). This approach maps directly to a more traditional query string, the difference is merely in the execution. With HTML5 pushState() you can eliminate the #hash and use completely classic URLs which can resolve on the server on the first request and then load via ajax on subsequent requests.
2. With SPA we don't need to use extra queries to the server to download pages.
The number of pages user downloads during visit to my web site?? really how many mails some reads when he/she opens his/her mail account. I read >50 at one go. now the structure of the mails is almost the same. if you will use a server side rendering scheme the server would then render it on every request(typical case).
- security concern - you should/ should not keep separate pages for the admins/login that entirely depends upon the structure of you site take paytm.com for example also making a web site SPA does not mean that you open all the endpoints for all the users I mean I use forms auth with my spa web site.
- in the probably most used SPA framework Angular JS the dev can load the entire html temple from the web site so that can be done depending on the users authentication level. pre loading html for all the auth types isn't SPA.
3. May be any other advantages? Don't hear about any else..
these days you can safely assume the client will have javascript enabled browsers.
only one entry point of the site. As I mentioned earlier maintenance of state is possible you can have any number of entry points as you want but you should have one for sure.
even in an SPA user only see to what he has proper rights. you don't have to inject every thing at once. loading diff html templates and javascript async is also a valid part of SPA.
Advantages that I can think of are:
rendering html obviously takes some resources now every user visiting you site is doing this. also not only rendering major logics are now done client side instead of server side.
date time issues - I just give the client UTC time is a pre set format and don't even care about the time zones I let javascript handle it. this is great advantage to where I had to guess time zones based on location derived from users IP.
to me state is more nicely maintained in an SPA because once you have set a variable you know it will be there. this gives a feel of developing an app rather than a web page. this helps a lot typically in making sites like foodpanda, flipkart, amazon. because if you are not using client side state you are using expensive sessions.
websites surely are extremely responsive - I'll take an extreme example for this try making a calculator in a non SPA website(I know its weird).
Updates from Comments
It doesn't seem like anyone mentioned about sockets and long-polling.
If you log out from another client say mobile app, then your browser
should also log out. If you don't use SPA, you have to re-create the
socket connection every time there is a redirect. This should also
work with any updates in data like notifications, profile update etc
An alternate perspective: Aside from your website, will your project
involve a native mobile app? If yes, you are most likely going to be
feeding raw data to that native app from a server (ie JSON) and doing
client-side processing to render it, correct? So with this assertion,
you're ALREADY doing a client-side rendering model. Now the question
becomes, why shouldn't you use the same model for the website-version
of your project? Kind of a no-brainer. Then the question becomes
whether you want to render server-side pages only for SEO benefits and
convenience of shareable/bookmarkable URLs
I am a pragmatist, so I will try to look at this in terms of costs and benefits.
Note that for any disadvantage I give, I recognize that they are solvable. That's why I don't look at anything as black and white, but rather, costs and benefits.
Advantages
Easier state tracking - no need to use cookies, form submission, local storage, session storage, etc. to remember state between 2 page loads.
Boiler plate content that is on every page (header, footer, logo, copyright banner, etc.) only loads once per typical browser session.
No overhead latency on switching "pages".
Disadvantages
Performance monitoring - hands tied: Most browser-level performance monitoring solutions I have seen focus exclusively on page load time only, like time to first byte, time to build DOM, network round trip for the HTML, onload event, etc. Updating the page post-load via AJAX would not be measured. There are solutions which let you instrument your code to record explicit measures, like when clicking a link, start a timer, then end a timer after rendering the AJAX results, and send that feedback. New Relic, for example, supports this functionality. By using a SPA, you have tied yourself to only a few possible tools.
Security / penetration testing - hands tied: Automated security scans can have difficulty discovering links when your entire page is built dynamically by a SPA framework. There are probably solutions to this, but again, you've limited yourself.
Bundling: It is easy to get into a situation when you are downloading all of the code needed for the entire web site on the initial page load, which can perform terribly for low-bandwidth connections. You can bundle your JavaScript and CSS files to try to load in more natural chunks as you go, but now you need to maintain that mapping and watch for unintended files to get pulled in via unrealized dependencies (just happened to me). Again, solvable, but with a cost.
Big bang refactoring: If you want to make a major architectural change, like say, switch from one framework to another, to minimize risk, it's desirable to make incremental changes. That is, start using the new, migrate on some basis, like per-page, per-feature, etc., then drop the old after. With traditional multi-page app, you could switch one page from Angular to React, then switch another page in the next sprint. With a SPA, it's all or nothing. If you want to change, you have to change the entire application in one go.
Complexity of navigation: Tooling exists to help maintain navigational context in SPA's, like history.js, Angular 2, most of which rely on either the URL framework (#) or the newer history API. If every page was a separate page, you don't need any of that.
Complexity of figuring out code: We naturally think of web sites as pages. A multi-page app usually partitions code by page, which aids maintainability.
Again, I recognize that every one of these problems is solvable, at some cost.
But there comes a point where you are spending all your time solving problems which you could have just avoided in the first place. It comes back to the benefits and how important they are to you.
Disadvantages
1. Client must enable javascript. Yes, this is a clear disadvantage of SPA. In my case I know that I can expect my users to have JavaScript enabled. If you can't then you can't do a SPA, period. That's like trying to deploy a .NET app to a machine without the .NET Framework installed.
2. Only one entry point to the site. I solve this problem using SammyJS. 2-3 days of work to get your routing properly set up, and people will be able to create deep-link bookmarks into your app that work correctly. Your server will only need to expose one endpoint - the "give me the HTML + CSS + JS for this app" endpoint (think of it as a download/update location for a precompiled application) - and the client-side JavaScript you write will handle the actual entry into the application.
3. Security. This issue is not unique to SPAs, you have to deal with security in exactly the same way when you have an "old-school" client-server app (the HATEOAS model of using Hypertext to link between pages). It's just that the user is making the requests rather than your JavaScript, and that the results are in HTML rather than JSON or some data format. In a non-SPA app you have to secure the individual pages on the server, whereas in a SPA app you have to secure the data endpoints. (And, if you don't want your client to have access to all the code, then you have to split apart the downloadable JavaScript into separate areas as well. I simply tie that into my SammyJS-based routing system so the browser only requests things that the client knows it should have access to, based on an initial load of the user's roles, and then that becomes a non-issue.)
Advantages
A major architectural advantage of a SPA (that rarely gets mentioned) in many cases is the huge reduction in the "chattiness" of your app. If you design it properly to handle most processing on the client (the whole point, after all), then the number of requests to the server (read "possibilities for 503 errors that wreck your user experience") is dramatically reduced. In fact, a SPA makes it possible to do entirely offline processing, which is huge in some situations.
Performance is certainly better with client-side rendering if you do it right, but this is not the most compelling reason to build a SPA. (Network speeds are improving, after all.) Don't make the case for SPA on this basis alone.
Flexibility in your UI design is perhaps the other major advantage that I have found. Once I defined my API (with an SDK in JavaScript), I was able to completely rewrite my front-end with zero impact on the server aside from some static resource files. Try doing that with a traditional MVC app! :) (This becomes valuable when you have live deployments and version consistency of your API to worry about.)
So, bottom line: If you need offline processing (or at least want your clients to be able to survive occasional server outages) - dramatically reducing your own hardware costs - and you can assume JavaScript & modern browsers, then you need a SPA. In other cases it's more of a tradeoff.
One major disadvantage of SPA - SEO. Only recently Google and Bing started indexing Ajax-based pages by executing JavaScript during crawling, and still in many cases pages are being indexed incorrectly.
While developing SPA, you will be forced to handle SEO issues, probably by post-rendering all your site and creating static html snapshots for crawler's use. This will require a solid investment in a proper infrastructures.
Update 19.06.16:
Since writing this answer a while ago, I gain much more experience with Single Page Apps (namely, AngularJS 1.x) - so I have more info to share.
In my opinion, the main disadvantage of SPA applications is SEO, making them limited to kind of "dashboard" apps only. In addition, you are going to have a much harder times with caching, compared to classic solutions. For example, in ASP.NET caching is extreamly easy - just turn on OutputCaching and you are good: the whole HTML page will be cached according to URL (or any other parameters). However, in SPA you will need to handle caching yourself (by using some solutions like second level cache, template caching, etc..).
I would like to make the case for SPA being best for Data Driven Applications. gmail, of course is all about data and thus a good candidate for a SPA.
But if your page is mostly for display, for example, a terms of service page, then a SPA is completely overkill.
I think the sweet spot is having a site with a mixture of both SPA and static/MVC style pages, depending on the particular page.
For example, on one site I am building, the user lands on a standard MVC index page. But then when they go to the actual application, then it calls up the SPA. Another advantage to this is that the load-time of the SPA is not on the home page, but on the app page. The load time being on the home page could be a distraction to first time site users.
This scenario is a little bit like using Flash. After a few years of experience, the number of Flash only sites dropped to near zero due to the load factor. But as a page component, it is still in use.
For such companies as google, amazon etc, whose servers are running at max capacity in 24/7-mode, reducing traffic means real money - less hardware, less energy, less maintenance. Shifting CPU-usage from server to client pays off, and SPAs shine. The advantages overweight disadvantages by far.
So, SPA or not SPA depends much on the use case.
Just for mentioning another, probably not so obvious (for Web-developers) use case for SPAs:
I'm currently looking for a way to implement GUIs in embedded systems and browser-based architecture seems appealing to me. Traditionally there were not many possibilities for UIs in embedded systems - Java, Qt, wx, etc or propriety commercial frameworks. Some years ago Adobe tried to enter the market with flash but seems to be not so successful.
Nowadays, as "embedded systems" are as powerful as mainframes some years ago, a browser-based UI connected to the control unit via REST is a possible solution. The advantage is, the huge palette of tools for UI for no cost. (e.g. Qt require 20-30$ per sold unit on royalty fees plus 3000-4000$ per developer)
For such architecture SPA offers many advantages - e.g. more familiar development-approach for desktop-app developers, reduced server access (often in car-industry the UI and system muddles are separate hardware, where the system-part has an RT OS).
As the only client is the built-in browser, the mentioned disadvantages like JS-availability, server-side logging, security don't count any more.
2. With SPA we don't need to use extra queries to the server to download pages.
I still have to learn a lot but since I started learn about SPA, I love them.
This particular point may make a huge difference.
In many web apps that are not SPA, you will see that they will still retrieve and add content to the pages making ajax requests. So I think that SPA goes beyond by considering: what if the content that is going to be retrieved and displayed using ajax is the whole page? and not just a small portion of a page?
Let me present an scenario. Consider that you have 2 pages:
a page with list of products
a page to view the details of a specific product
Consider that you are at the list page. Then you click on a product to view the details. The client side app will trigger 2 ajax requests:
a request to get a json object with the product details
a request to get an html template where the product details will be inserted
Then, the client side app will insert the data into the html template and display it.
Then you go back to the list (no request is done for this!) and you open another product. This time, there will be only an ajax request to get the details of the product. The html template is going to be the same so you don't need to download again.
You may say that in a non SPA, when you open the product details, you make only 1 request and in this scenario we did 2. Yes. But you get the gain from an overall perspective, when you navigate across of many pages, the number of requests is going to be lower. And the data that is transferred between the client side and the server is going to be lower too because the html templates are going to be reused. Also, you don't need to download in every requests all those css, images, javascript files that are present in all the pages.
Also, let's consider that you server side language is Java. If you analyze the 2 requests that I mentioned, 1 downloads data (you don't need to load any view file and call the view rendering engine) and the other downloads and static html template so you can have an HTTP web server that can retrieve it directly without having to call the Java application server, no computation is done!
Finally, the big companies are using SPA: Facebook, GMail, Amazon. They don't play, they have the greatest engineers studying all this. So if you don't see the advantages you can initially trust them and hope to discover them down the road.
But is important to use good SPA design patterns. You may use a framework like AngularJS. Don't try to implement an SPA without using good design patterns because you may end up having a mess.
Disadvantages:
Technically, design and initial development of SPA is complex and can be avoided. Other reasons for not using this SPA can be:
a) Security: Single Page Application is less secure as compared to traditional pages due to cross site scripting(XSS).
b) Memory Leak: Memory leak in JavaScript can even cause powerful Computer to slow down. As traditional websites encourage to navigate among pages, thus any memory leak caused by previous page is almost cleansed leaving less residue behind.
c) Client must enable JavaScript to run SPA, but in multi-page application JavaScript can be completely avoided.
d) SPA grows to optimal size, cause long waiting time. Eg: Working on Gmail with slower connection.
Apart from above, other architectural limitations are Navigational Data loss, No log of Navigational History in browser and difficulty in Automated Functional Testing with selenium.
This link explain Single Page Application's Advantages and Disadvantages.
Try not to consider using a SPA without first defining how you will address security and API stability on the server side. Then you will see some of the true advantages to using a SPA. Specifically, if you use a RESTful server that implements OAUTH 2.0 for security, you will achieve two fundamental separation of concerns that can lower your development and maintenance costs.
This will move the session (and it's security) onto the SPA and relieve your server from all of that overhead.
Your API's become both stable and easily extensible.
Hinted to earlier, but not made explicit; If your goal is to deploy Android & Apple applications, writing a JavaScript SPA that is wrapped by a native call to host the screen in a browser (Android or Apple) eliminates the need to maintain both an Apple code base and an Android code base.
I understand this is an older question, but I would like to add another disadvantage of Single Page Applications:
If you build an API that returns results in a data language (such as XML or JSON) rather than a formatting language (like HTML), you are enabling greater application interoperability, for example, in business-to-business (B2B) applications. Such interoperability has great benefits but does allow people to write software to "mine" (or steal) your data. This particular disadvantage is common to all APIs that use a data language, and not to SPAs in general (indeed, an SPA that asks the server for pre-rendered HTML avoids this, but at the expense of poor model/view separation). This risk exposed by this disadvantage can be mitigated by various means, such as request limiting and connection blocking, etc.
In my development I found two distinct advantages for using an SPA. That is not to say that the following can not be achieved in a traditional web app just that I see incremental benefit without introducing additional disadvantages.
Potential for less server request as rendering new content isn’t always or even ever an http server request for a new html page. But I say potential because new content could easily require an Ajax call to pull in data but that data could be incrementally lighter than the itself plus markup providing a net benefit.
The ability to maintain “State”. In its simplest terms, set a variable on entry to the app and it will be available to other components throughout the user’s experience without passing it around or setting it to a local storage pattern. Intelligently managing this ability however is key to keep the top level scope uncluttered.
Other than requiring JS (which is not a crazy thing to require of web apps) other noted disadvantages are in my opinion either not specific to SPA or can be mitigated through good habits and development patterns.
I am developing a standard rails application, and so far I haven't used any AJAX, just good ol' HTML. My plan is to iteratively add "remote" links and all that kind of stuff and support for JS responses, because I know that generating JS server side is very very evil, but I find it to be very handy as well, easy, fast and it makes the application snappy enough and i18n comes out-of-the-box.
Using a pure JSON approach would be lighter, but needs lots of client-side coding.
Now imagine that in this application users have a mailbox, and since the idea is that they will be able to do most or even all of the actions without reloading the page, the mailbox counter will never change unless they refresh the page manually.
So, here comes the question: Which is the best way to handle this?
I thought about using Ember (for data binding), and sharing views with rails, via some sort of handlebars implementation for ruby. That would be quite awesome, but not very transparent for the developer (me). Although I guess that I only need to write handlebars views that will be used by ember, the rest can still be written in their original format, no?
Another option might be to use some sort of event system (EventSource maybe?), and just go with handy the JS views approach, and listen to those events. I guess those should be JSON objects, and the client must be coded to be able to handle them. This seems a bit cumbersome, and I need a solution for heroku (faye?), which is where my app is hosted. Any hints?
I think that the ember approach is the more robust one, but seems to be quite complex as well, and I don't want to repeat myself server and client side.
EDIT:
I have seen this, which is more or less the option #2.
One of the advantages of using a JavaScript framework is that the whole application can be concatenated and compressed into one JavaScript file. Provided that modern browsers aggressively cache JavaScript, the browser would no longer need to request those assets after initial page load.
Another advantage of using a JavaScript framework is that it requires you to be a consumer of your own API. Fleshing out the application's API for your own consumption might lend to less work in the future if there is a possibility of mobile applications or 3rd parties having access to it.
If you do not need your application to respond to every request with an equivalent HTML response, I think a compelling case could be made for using a JavaScript framework.
Many of those benefits might be lost if your application needs to respond to every request with an equivalent HTML template. The Ember core has been relatively vocal and in opposition to supporting this style of progressive enhancement. Considering the tools for using a JavaScript framework in this way are relatively unstable and immature, I might be prone to using option 2 to accomplish this.