what are the downsides of using javascript to build an entire webpage? - javascript

A friend of mine is programming a web page. Instead of writing any HTML in the .html file, he is outputting the entire website with javascript. Excluding SEO, or the fact that it will be a pain to debug, what are the downsides to this? Also, if there is an upside, what would an upside be?

As you are already aware, SEO is a big deal. SEO is usually the elephant in the room (e.g. the big deal) for javascript-based web-sites and you either forgo SEO or have to somehow design an alternate path that the search engines can index you via and that doesn't run afoul of their rules about serving different content to search engines.
Some potential downsides:
Accessibility - access via screen readers and other tools that may be geared to the page HTML.
Mobile - Sometimes rendering the page will require larger downloads, more javascript code and more data and more CPU to build the page than a simpler server-rendered page. This may cause compromises on small devices without a lot of bandwidth or horsepower.
Performance - The initial page display time may be slower as you can't render anything until all data and code has been downloaded and run. Subsequent page times might be faster or slower depending upon how the app is written. Sometimes you save server trips by doing client-side rendering (which could be faster), but sometimes it's slower to do things on the client.
Security - Somethings simply can't be secured client-side the way they can server-side.
Code secrecy - Code in browsers is open to the world to see. Code on servers can be kept secret.
Same-origin limitations - Browsers are much more limited in who they can contact than servers are because of the same-origin limitation.
Memory - Lots of code and lots of data can consume a lot more memory for your app than a server-generated HTML page. This probably isn't meaningful on a desktop, but could be on a smaller device.
Some of the upsides:
The content can be dynamically rendered with lots of smarts based on the type of user, the screen size, the capabilities of the device, etc... and this local rendering can generally be done more effectively than trying to do it on the server.
You can often do lots of the functions of the app without ever reloading the page, just fetching data from the server or issuing commands to the server with ajax and never reloading the page.

One big downside may be mobile.
Depending on the functionality, a javascript-only page may be slow for those on mobile devices.
The pages may be resource heavy, if you are using one or more libraries and / or accessing lots of information. This could also cost a fair amount for those on mobile devices.
Another downside could be accessibility. Not sure how enabling software for low/no vision users would work with a js only site.

My opinion that such kind of coding is more appropriate for members only areas, that of course are not reachable by search engines.
Provided that you use a good library, that is able to do the layout for you, such as ExtJS, it's an interesting coding. You can build web applications that look similar to desktop applications. Browser differences are smoothed out by the library and expect to have very few problems, if any.
For public websites, in general the SEO argument is a pretty big one. If nobody can find you...

Related

Client-side vs. server-side templating (which one?)

I've been reading some very interesting articles about the whole client vs. server rendering lately.
http://www.onebigfluke.com/2015/01/experimentally-verified-why-client-side.html
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/01/angular_and_tem.html
http://tomdale.net/2015/02/youre-missing-the-point-of-server-side-rendered-javascript-apps/
Now I've been a bit of a fan boy when it comes to client side but after I read these articles some points started to show up in favor of the server side rendering, to my surprise... The main points were:
1) You can upgrade your server, but not your users device - This means, well, yes... you are in control of the server, so if it's under performing you may opt to upgrade/scale. You can't force users to upgrade their devices.
2) First paint vs. last paint - Now on the experimentally verified... link above it shows when the users first see the page (first paint) and when the users may use the page 100% (last paint). Now from what I can think of when the user sees the page, it takes their brain some time to process the signals from the visual cortex to the frontal cortex and then to the premoter cortex where the user actually starts clicking his/her finger, that is of course if the html is rendered first so the brain has something to process while loading is happening in the background (js files, binding etc.).
What really got me was the bit were twitter reported people of having up to 10 seconds of loading time for client side rendering, no one should ever experience that! It's kind of saying, "Well if you don't have a good enough device, sorry, you'll just have to wait.".
I've been thinking, isn't there a good way of using both client-side and server-side templating engines and which both client and server use the same template engine and code. In that case it's only to figure out if it's benefactor to supply the client with the rendered page or let the client render it themselves.
In any case, share your thoughts on my sayings and the articles if you want. I'm all ears!
UPD: do it only if you really need it
(4 years and 2 isomorphic enterprise apps later)
If you're required to do SSR, fine. If you can go with a simple SPA - go with it.
Why so? SPAs are easier to develop, easier to debug and cheaper and easier to run.
The development and debugging complications are evident. What do I mean by "cheaper and easier to run", though? Well, guess what, if 10K users try to open your app at the same time your static HTML website (i.e. a built SPA) you won't even feel it. If you're running an isomorphic webapp though, the TTFB will go up, RAM usage will go up and eventually you'll have to run a cluster of those.
So, unless you are required to show some super-low TTFB times (which will likely come through aggressive caching), don't overcomplicate your life.
Original answer from 2015:
Basically you're looking for an isomorphic web app that shares the same code for frontend and backend.
Isomorphic JavaScript
JavaScript applications which run both client-side and server-side. Isomorphic JavaScript frameworks are the next step in the evolution of JavaScript frameworks. These new libraries and frameworks are solving the problems associated with traditional JavaScript frameworks.
I bet this guy explains that much better that me.
So, when a user comes to the page, the server renders the full page with contents. So it loads faster and requires no extra ajax requests to load data, etc. Then, when a user navigates to another page, the usual techniques for single page applications are used.
So, WHY WOULD I CARE?
Old browsers / Weak devices / Disabled Javascript
SEO
Some page load improvements
Old browsers / Weak devices / Disabled Javascript
For example, IE9 does not support History API. So, for old browsers (and if user disables javascript too), they would just navigate through pages just like they did it it in good old days.
SEO
Google says it supports SPA's but SPA's aren't likely to appear in the top results of google search, are they?
Page speed
As it was stated, the first page loads with one HTTP request, and that's all.
OK, so
There are lots of articles on that:
http://nerds.airbnb.com/isomorphic-javascript-future-web-apps/
http://www.sitepoint.com/isomorphic-javascript-applications/
https://www.lullabot.com/articles/what-is-an-isomorphic-application
But SHOULD I CARE?
It's up to you, of course.
Yeah, that's cool, but it takes much work to rewrite/adapt the existing app. And if your backend is in PHP/Ruby/Python/Java/Whatever, I've got bad news for you (it's not necessarily impossible, but close to that).
It depends on the website, you can try to collect some stats and if the percentage of users with old devices is small, it's not worth the trouble, so why not...
LET THEM SUFFER
If you care only about users with old devices, then c'mon, it 2015, and it's your user's problem if he's using IE8 of browsing websites with a iPod Touch 2. For example, Angular dropped IE8 support in 1.3 approximately a year ago, so why wouldn't you just alert the users that they need to upgrade ;)
Cheers!
All of the conversations on this topic miss one point. Bytes sent to the client. Pages rendered as HTML on the server are a lot smaller. Less bytes transmitted is better for everyone, both server and client. I've seen the bandwidth costs on cloud sites and even a 10% reduction can be a huge saving. Client side JS pages are always fat.

Single Page Application: advantages and disadvantages [closed]

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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.

Advantages of All-Javascript Webpages

I have noticed that many big(huge) sites like Google and Facebook when looking to the page source 99% of the source is JavaScript.
Does anybody know the advantages to this approach versus regular HTML+JavaScript pages?
Is it just to add some security or does it have benefits in terms of performance or maintainability?
One reason why I have implemented pages in this pattern is because I wanted to have a client-agnostic server that just serves data packaged in an easily-parseable format (such as JSON) so that the same server could be used to drive a traditional webapp as well as other things such as native Android and iPhone applications without needing any special modifications to server code.
A JavaScript-heavy page allows you to work with such a setup by having the JavaScript request the required data from the server and then use it to construct an interface in HTML. Given that most of the major players have similar concerns with wanting a single server architecture to power an application across a large number of platforms, that may be a contributing factor with respect to why they have chosen to implement their webpages primarily in JavaScript.
Advantages of All-Javascript Webpages
There are many disadvantages, one being that accessibility is destroyed. Another is that you very often end up completely rewriting the client UI, which then leads to cross-browser issues and clunky performance since native browser functions are replaced with DOM equivalents.
Try any of those sites with an older or non-mainstream browser and older PC. You probably won't like the experience.
Lastly, search bots won't index your site unless they are clever enough to understand the script and data - I don't think many do.
None of those in my opinion. It's just more interactive and easier to do if you want to show differently on different screen sizes and so on.
And some perfomances for some parts (I saw a thing from msdn where they were storing chunks on localstorage with JavaScript and therefore incredibly decreasing the number of http requests but it means droping browsers without JS).
I would definitely not recommend writing pages predominantly with javascript 'manually'. I think the most likely reason their pages look like this is that they are using libraries such as JSF etc. that generate javascript dynamically for them. Javascript does have the performance benefit of running directly on the client instead of needing to request the server to do the work (which implies a round trip to the server) although this is usually limited to trivial tasks that do not require access to server resources. As for maintainability though, I would say a page written with too much 'manual' javascript would be harder to maintain. For better maintainability you should include javascript in a separate js file.

Json only web application. What are the cons? (or Pros)

I want to design a web application whose only interface is json i.e. all the http requests receive responses only in json format and dont render any html on the server side. All the form posts convert the form data into a json object and then post it as a string. All the rendering is done by client side javascript.
The one downside of this approach I know is that browsers without javascript wont be able to do much with this architecture but the interaction on the site is rich enough to be useless to non-javascript browsers anyway.
Are there any other downsides of this approach of designing a web application?
It's an increasingly-common pattern, with tools such as GWT and ext-js. Complex web apps such as GMail have been over 90% JS-created DOM for some time. If you are developing a traditional 'journal' type website with mainly written content to be read this approach will be overkill. But for a complex app that wishes to avoid page refreshes it may well be appropriate.
One downside is that not only does it require a browser that supports JavaScript, it is also easy for the computing resources required by the app to creep up to the point where it needs quite a powerful browser. If you develop in Chrome on a top-end PC you might come to run the app on a less powerful machine such as a netbook or mobile device and find it has become quite sluggish.
Another downside is you lose the opportunity to use HTML tools when working on your pages, and that viewing your application's pages' DOM trees under Firebug or Chrome Developer Tools may be hard work because the relationship between the elements and your code may not be clear.
Edit: another thing to consider is that it is more work to make pages more accessible, as keyboard shortcuts may have to be added (you may not be able to use the browser built in behavior here) and users with special needs may find it more difficult to vary the appearance of the app, for instance by increasing font size.
Another edit: it's unlikely now text content on your website will be successfully crawled by search engines. For this reason you sometimes see server created text-only pages representing the same content, that refer browsers to the JS-enabled version of the page.
Other than the issue you point out, there's another: Speed. But it's not necessarily a big issue, and in fact using JSON rather than HTML may (over slower connections) improve rather than hamper speed.
Web browsers are highly optimised to render HTML, both whole pages (e.g., normally) and fragments (e.g., innerHTML and the various wrappers for it, like jQuery's html or Prototype's update). There's a lot you can do to minimize the speed impact of working through your returned data and rendering the result, but nothing is going to be quite as fast as grabbing some HTML markup from the server and dumping it into the browser for display.
Now, that said, it's not necessarily going to be a big problem at all. If you use efficient techniques (some notes in this article), and if you primarily render the results by building up HTML strings you're then going to hand to the brower (again, via innerHTML or wrappers for it), or if you're rending only a few elements at a time, it's unlikely that there will be any perceptible speed difference.
If, instead, you build up substantial trees by creating and appending individual elements via the DOM API or wrappers for it, you're very likely to notice a performance impact. That seems like the right thing to do, but it involves lots of trips across the DOM/JavaScript boundary and means the browser has to present the DOM version of things to your code at all intermediate steps; in contrast, when you hand it an HTML string, it can do its thing and romp through it full-speed-ahead. You can see the difference in this performance test. It's substantial.
Over slower connections, the speed impact may be made up for or even overcome if the JSON data is more compact than the HTML would have been, because of the smaller size on the wire.
You've got to be more mindful of high-latency, low-bandwidth connections when you're building something like this. The likelihood is, you're going to be making a lot of Ajax calls to sync data and grab new data from the server, and the lag can be noticeable if there's a lot of latency. You need a strategy in place to keep the user informed about the progress of any communication between client and server.
In development, it's something that can be overlooked, especially if you're working with a local web server, but it can be killer in production. It means looking into prefetching and caching strategies.
You also need an effective way to manage HTML fragments/templates. Obviously, there are some good modules out there for rendering templates - Mustache.js, Underscore template, etc. - but keeping on top of the HTML fragments can cause some maintenance headaches. I tend to store the HTML templates in separate files, and load them dynamically via Ajax calls (plus caching to minimise HTTP requests).
Edit - another con:
Data syncing - if you use a server database as your data "authority" then it's important to keep data in sync between the server and client. This is even more relevant if changes to data on one client affects multiple clients. You then get into the realms of dealing with realtime, asynchronous updates, which can cause some interesting conceptual challenges. (Fortunately, using frameworks and libraries such as Socket.IO and Backbone.js can really make things easier).
Edit - pros:
There are some huge advantages to this type of application - it's far more responsive, and can really enhance the user experience. Trivial actions that would normally require a round-trip to the server and incur network overhead can now be performed quickly and seamlessly.
Also, it allows you to more effectively couple data to your views. Chances are, if you're handling the data on the client-side, you will have a framework in place that allows you to organise the data and make use of an ORM - whether its Backbone.js, Knockout.js or something similar. You no longer have to worry about storing data in html attributes or in temporary variables. Everything becomes a lot more manageable, and it opens the door for some really sophisticated UI development.
Also also, JavaScript opens up the possibility for event-driven interaction, which is the perfect paradigm for highly interactive applications. By making use of the event loop, you can hook your data directly to user-initiated and custom events, which opens up great possibilities. By hooking your data models directly to user-driven events, you can robustly handle updates and changes to data and render the appropriate output with minimal fuss. And it all happens at high speed.
I think the most important thing is what is your requirement, if you want to build a interactive application, giving desktop like feel then go for client side development. Using Javascript framework like backbone.js or knockout.js will really help in organizing and maintaining the code. The advantages are already detailed out in previous answers. As respect to the performance in rendering with respect to server side rendering is concerned here is a nice blog post which made thinking.
http://openmymind.net/2012/5/30/Client-Side-vs-Server-Side-Rendering/

Just In General: JS Only Vs Page-Based Web Apps

When a developing a web app, versus a web site, what reasons are there to use multiple HTML pages, rather than using one html page and doing everything through Javascript?
I would expect that it depends on the application -- maybe -- but would appreciate any thoughts on the subject.
Thanks in advance.
EDIT:
Based on the responses here, and some of my own research, if you wanted to do a single-page, fully JS-Powered site, some useful tools would seem to include:
JQuery Plug Ins:
JQuery History:
http://balupton.com/projects/jquery-history
JQuery Address:
http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jquery-address
JQuery Pagination:
http://plugins.jquery.com/project/pagination
Frameworks:
Sproutcore
http://www.sproutcore.com/
Cappucino
http://cappuccino.org/
Possibly, JMVC:
http://www.javascriptmvc.com/
page based applications provide:
ability to work on any browser or device
simpler programming model
they also provide the following (although these are solvable by many js frameworks):
bookmarkability
browser history
refresh or F5 to repeat action
indexability (in case the application is public and open)
One of the bigger reasons is going to be how searchable your website is.
Doing everything in javascript is going to make it complicated for search engines to crawl all content of your website, and thus not fully indexing it. There are ways around this (with Google's recent AJAX SEO guidelines) but I'm not sure if all search engines support this yet. On top of that, it's a little bit more complex then just making separate pages.
The bigger issue, whether you decide to build multiple HTML pages, or you decide to use some sort of framework or CMS to generate them for you, is that the different sections of your website have URL's that are unique to them. E.g., an about section would have a URL like mywebsite.com/about, and that URL is used on the actual "about" link within the website.
One of the biggest downfalls of single-page, Ajax-ified websites is complexity. What might otherwise be spread across several pages suddenly finds its way into one huge, master page. Also, it can be difficult to coordinate the state of the page (for example, tracking if you are in Edit mode, or Preview mode, etc.) and adjusting the interface to match.
Also, one master page that is heavy on JS can be a performance drag if it has to load multiple, big JS files.
At the OP's request, I'm going to discuss my experience with JS-only sites. I've written four relevant sites: two JS-heavy (Slide and SpeedDate) and two JS-only (Yazooli and GameCrush). Keep in mind that I'm a JS-only-site bigot, so you're basically reading John Hinkley on the subject of Jody Foster.
The idea really works. It produces gracefully, responsive sites at very low operational costs. My estimate is that the cost for bandwidth, CPU, and such goes to 10% of the cost of running a similar page-based site.
You need fewer but better (or at least, better-trained) programmers. JavaScript is an powerful and elegant language, but it has huge problems that a more rigid and unimaginative language like Java doesn't have. If you have a whole bunch of basically mediocre guys working for you, consider JSP or Ruby instead of JS-only. If you are required to use PHP, just shoot yourself.
You have to keep basic session state in the anchor tag. Users simply expect that the URL represents the state of the site: reload, bookmark, back, forward. jQuery's Address plug-in will do a lot of the work for you.
If SEO is an issue for you, investigate Google Ajax Crawling. Basically, you make a very simple parallel site, just for search engines.
When would I not use JS-only? If I were producing a site that was almost entirely content, where the user did nothing but navigate from one place to another, never interacting with the site in a complicated manner. So, Wikipedia and ... well, that's about it. A big reference site, with a lot of data for the user to read.
modularization.
multiple files allows you to mre cleanly break out different workflow paths and process parts.
chances are your Business Rules are something that do not usually directly impact your layout rules and multiple files would better help in editing on what needs to be edited without the risk of breaking something unrelated.
I actually just developed my first application using only one page.
..it got messy
My idea was to create an application that mimicked the desktop environment as much as possible. In particular I wanted a detailed view of some app data to be in a popup window that would maintain it's state regardless of the section of the application they were in.
Thus my frankenstein was born.
What ended up happening due to budget/time constraints was the code got out of hand. The various sections of my JavaScript source got muddled together. Maintaining the proper state of various views I had proved to be... difficult.
With proper planning and technique I think the 'one-page' approach is a very easy way to open up some very interesting possibilities (ex: widgets that maintain state across application sections). But it also opens up many... many potential problem areas. including...
Flooding the global namespace (if you don't already have your own... make one)
Code organization can easily get... out of hand
Context - It's very easy to
I'm sure there are more...
In short, I would urge you to stay away from relying on JavaScript dependency for the compatibility issue's alone. What I've come to realize is there is simply no need rely on JavaScript to everything.
I'm actually in the process of removing JavaScript dependencies in loo of Progressive Enhancement. It just makes more sense. You can achieve the same or similar effects with properly coded JavaScript.
The idea is too...
Develop out well-formatted, fully functional application w/o any JavaScript
Style it
Wrap the whole thing with JavaScript
Using Progressive Enhancement one can develop an application that delivers the best possible experience for the user that is possible.
For some additional arguments, check out The Single Page Interface Manifesto and some (mostly) negative reaction to it on Hacker News (link at the bottom of the SPI page):
The Single Page Interface Manifesto: http://itsnat.sourceforge.net/php/spim/spi_manifesto_en.php
stofac, first of all, thanks for the link to the Single Page Interface (SPI) Manifesto (I'm the author of this boring text)
Said this, SPI != doing everything through Javascript
Take a look to this example (server-centric):
http://www.innowhere.com/insites/
The same in GAE:
http://itsnatsites.appspot.com/
More info about the GAE approach:
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=60270
In my opinion coding a complex SPI application/web site fully on JavaScript is very very complex and problematic, the best approach in my opinion is "hybrid programming" for SPI, a mix of server-centric for big state management and client-centric (a.k.a JavaScript by hand) for special effects.
Doing everything on a single page using ajax everywhere would break the browser's history/back button functionality and be annoying to the user.
I utterly despise JS-only sites where it is not needed. That extra condition makes all the difference. By way of example consider the oft quoted Google Docs, in this case it not only helps improve experiences it is essential. But some parts of Google Help have been JS-only and yet it adds nothing to the experience, it is only showing static content.
Here are reasons for my upset:
Like many, I am a user of NoScript and love it. Pages load faster, I feel safer and the more distracting adverts are avoided. The last point may seem like a bad thing for webmasters but I don't want anyone to get rewarded for pushing annoying flashy things in my face, if tactless advertisers go out of business I consider it natural selection.
Obviously this means some visitors to your site are either going to be turned away or feel hassled by the need to provide a temporary exclusion. This reduces your audience.
You are duplicating effort. The browser already has a perfectly good history function and you shouldn't need to reinvent the wheel by redrawing the previous page when a back button is clicked. To make matters worse going back a page shouldn't require re-rendering. I guess I am a student of If-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it School (from Don't-Repeat-Yourself U.).
There are no HTTP headers when traversing "pages" in JS. This means no cache controls, no expiries, content cannot be adjusted for requested language nor location, no meaningful "page not found" nor "unavailable" responses. You could write error handling routines within your uber-page that respond to failed AJAX fetches but that is more complexity and reinvention, it is redundant.
No caching is a big deal for me, without it proxies cannot work efficiently and caching has the greatest of all load reducing effects. Again, you could mimic some caching in your JS app but that is yet more complexity and redundancy, higher memory usage and poorer user experience overall.
Initial load times are greater. By loading so much Javascript on the first visit you are causing a longer delay.
More JavaScript complexity means more debugging in various browsers. Server-side processing means debugging only once.
Unfuddle (a bug-tracker) left a bad taste. One of my most unpleasant web experiences was being forced to use this service by an employer. On the surface it seems well suited; the JS-heavy section is private so doesn't need to worry about search engines, only repeat visitors will be using it so have time to turn off protections and shouldn't mind the initial JS library load.
But it's use of JS is pointless, most content is static. "Pages" were still being fetched (via AJAX) so the delay is the same. With the benefit of AJAX it should be polling in the background to check for changes but I wouldn't get notified when the visible page had been modified. Sections had different styles so there was an awkward re-rendering when traversing those, loading external stylesheets by Javascript is Bad Practice™. Ease of use was sacrificed for whizz-bang "look at our Web 2.0" features. Such a business-orientated application should concentrate on speed of retrieval, but it ended up slower.
Eventually I had to refuse to use it as it was disrupting the team's work flow. This is not good for client-vendor relationships.
Dynamic pages are harder to save for offline use. Some mobile users like to download in advance and turn off their connection to save power and data usage.
Dynamic pages are harder for screen readers to parse. While the number of blind users are probably less than those with NoScript or a mobile connection it is inexcusable to ignore accessibility - and in some countries even illegal, see the "Disability Discrimination Act" (1999) and "Equality Act" (2010).
As mentioned in other answers the "Progressive Enhancement", née "Unobtrusive Javascript", is the better approach. When I am required to make a JS-only site (remember, I don't object to it on principle and there are times when it is valid) I look forward to implementing the aforementioned AJAX crawling and hope it becomes more standardised in future.

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