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

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/

Related

Is there any difference between making DOM on the server/client side? (speed perspective) [duplicate]

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.

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.

Should I render this template using JavaScript or the server?

I'm rendering a news feed.
I'm planning to use Backbone.js for my javascript stuff because I'm sick of doing manual DOM binds with JQuery.
So right now I'm looking at 2 options.
When the user loads the page, the "news feed" container is blank. But the page triggers a javascript which renders the items of the news feed onto the screen. This would tie into Backbone's models and collections, etc.
When the user loads the page, the "news feed" is rendered by the server. Even if javascript was turned off, the items would still show because the server rendered it via a templating engine.
I want to use Backbone.js to keep my javascript clean. So, I should pick #1, right?? But #1 is much more complicated than #2.
By the way, the reason I'm asking this question is because I don't want to use the routing feature of Backbone.js. I would load each page individually, and use Backbone for the individual items of the page. In other words, I'm using Backbone.js halfway.
If I were to use the routing feature of Backbone.js, then the obvious answer would be #1, right? But I'm afraid it would take too much time to build the route system, and time should be balanced into my equation as well.
I'm sorry if this question is confusing: I just want to know the best practice of using Backbone.js and saving time as well.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both, so I would say this: choose the option that is best for you, according to your requirements.
I don't know Backbone.js, so I'm going to keep my answer to client- versus server-side rendering.
Client-side Rendering
This approach allows you to render your structure quickly on the server-side, then let the user's JavaScript pick up the actual content.
Pros:
Quicker perceived user experience: if there's enough static content on the initial render, then the user gets their page back (or at least the beginning of it) quicker and they won't be bothered about the dynamic content, because in all likelihood that will render reasonably quickly too.
Better control of caching: By requiring that the browser makes multiple requests, you can set up your server to use different caching headers for each URL, depending on your requirements. In this way, you could allow users to cache the initial page render, but require that a user fetch dynamic (changing) content every time.
Cons:
User must have JavaScript enabled: This is an obvious one and I shouldn't even need to mention it, but you are cutting out a (very small) portion of your user base if you don't provide a graceful alternative to your JS-heavy site.
Complexity: This one is a little subjective, but in some ways it's just simpler to have everything in your server-side language and not require so much back-and-forth. Of course, it can go both ways.
Slow post-processing: This depends on the browser, but the fact is that if a lot of DOM manipulation or other post-processing needs to occur after retrieving the dynamic content, it might be faster to let the server do it if the server is underutilized. Most browsers are good at basic DOM manipulation, but if you have to do JSON parsing, sorting, arithmetic, etc., some of that might be faster on the server.
Server-side Rendering
This approach allows the user to receive everything at once and also caters to browsers that don't have good JavaScript support, but it also means everything takes a bit longer before the browser gets the first <html> tag.
Pros:
Content appears all at once: If your server is fast, it will render everything all at once, and that's that. No messy XmlHttpRequests (does anyone still use those directly?).
Quick post-processing: Just like you wouldn't want your application layer to do sorting of a database queryset because the database is faster, you might also want to reserve a good amount of processing on the server-side. If you design for the client-side approach, it's easy to get carried away and put the processing in the wrong place.
Cons:
Slower perceived user experience: A user won't be able to see a single byte until the server's work is all done. Sure, the server is probably going to zip through it, but it's still a few extra seconds on the user's side and you would do them a favor by rendering what you can right away.
Does not scale as well because server spends more time on requests: It might be that you really want the server to finish a request quickly and move on to the next connection.
Which of these are most important to your requirements? That should inform your decision.
I don't know backbone, but here's a simple thought: if at all possible and secure, do everything on the client instead of the server. That way the server has less work to do and can therefore handle more connections and scale better.
But #1 is much more complicated than #2.
Not really. Once you get your hang of Backbone and jQuery and client-side templating (and maybe throw CoffeeScript into the mix, too), then this is not really difficult. In fact, it greatly simplifies your server code, as all the display-related functions are now removed. You could also even have different clients (mobile version, for example) running against the same server.
Even if javascript was turned off, the items would still show because the server rendered it via a templating engine.
That is the important consideration here. If you want to support users without Javascript, then you need a non-JS version.
If you already have a non-JS version, you can think about if you still need the "enhanced" version, and if you do, if you want to re-use the server-side templating you already have coded and tested and need to maintain anyway, or duplicate the effort client-side, which adds development cost, but as you say may provide a superior experience and lower the load on the server (although I cannot imagine that fetching rendered data versus fetching XML data makes that much of a difference).
If you do not need to support users without Javascript, then by all means, render on the client.
I think Backbone's aim is to organize a Javascript in-page client application. But first of all you should take a position on the next statement:
Even if javascript was turned off, the web-app still works in "post-back mode".
Is that one of your requirements? (This is not a simple requirement.) If no, then I'll advice you: "Do more JS". But if yes then I believe your best friend is jQuery load function.
A Note: I'm a Java programmer and there's a lot of server-side frameworks that bring the ability to write applications that work ajax-ly when js is enabled and switch on post-backs when it isn't. I think Wicket and Echo2 are two of them but it's meant they are server-side libraries...

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.

Why don't I just build the whole web app in Javascript and Javascript HTML Templates?

I'm getting to the point on an app where I need to start caching things, and it got me thinking...
In some parts of the app, I render table rows (jqGrid, slickgrid, etc.) or fancy div rows (like in the New Twitter) by grabbing pure JSON and running it through something like Mustache, jquery.tmpl, etc.
In other parts of the app, I just render the info in pure HTML (server-side HAML templates), and if there's searching/paginating, I just go to a new URL and load a new HTML page.
Now the problem is in caching and maintainability.
On one hand I'm thinking, if everything was built using Javascript HTML Templates, then my app would serve just an HTML layout/shell, and a bunch of JSON. If you look at the Facebook and Twitter HTML source, that's basically what they're doing (95% json/javascript, 5% html). This would make it so my app only needed to cache JSON (pages, actions, and/or records). Which means you'd hit the cache no matter if you were some remote api developer accessing a JSON api, or the strait web app. That is, I don't need 2 caches, one for the JSON, one for the HTML. That seems like it'd cut my cache store down in half, and streamline things a little bit.
On the other hand, I'm thinking, from what I've seen/experienced, generating static HTML server-side, and caching that, seems to be much better performance wise cross-browser; you get the graphics instantly and don't have to wait that split-second for javascript to render it. StackOverflow seems to do everything in plain HTML, so does Google, and you can tell... everything appears at once. Notice how though on twitter.com, the page is blank for .5-1 seconds, and the page chunks in: the javascript has to render the json. The downside with this is that, for anything dynamic (like endless scrolling, or grids), I'd have to create javascript templates anyway... so now I have server-side HAML templates, client-side javascript templates, and a lot more to cache.
My question is, is there any consensus on how to approach this? What are the benefits and drawbacks from your experience of mixing the two versus going 100% with one over the other?
Update:
Some reasons that factor into why I haven't yet made the decision to go with 100% javascript templating are:
Performance. Haven't formally tested, but from what I've seen, raw html renders faster and more fluidly than javascript-generated html cross-browser. Plus, I'm not sure how mobile devices handle dynamic html performance-wise.
Testing. I have a lot of integration tests that work well with static HTML, so switching to javascript-only would require 1) more focused pure-javascript testing (jasmine), and 2) integrating javascript into capybara integration tests. This is just a matter of time and work, but it's probably significant.
Maintenance. Getting rid of HAML. I love HAML, it's so easy to write, it prints pretty HTML... It makes code clean, it makes maintenance easy. Going with javascript, there's nothing as concise.
SEO. I know google handles the ajax /#!/path, but haven't grasped how this will affect other search engines and how older browsers handle it. Seems like it'd require a significant setup.
Persistant private data storage.
You need a server to store data with various levels of public/private access. You also need a server for secure closed source information. You need a server to do heavy lifting that you don't want to do on the client. Complex data querying is best left upto your database engine. Indexing and searching is not yet optimised for javascript.
Also you have the issues of older browsers being far slower. If your not running FF4/Chrome or IE9 then there is a big difference between data manipulation and page construction on the client and the server.
I myself am going to be trying to build a web application made entirely using a MVC framework and template's but still using the server to connect to secure and optimised database.
But in general the application can indeed be build entirely in javascript and using templates. The various constructs and javascript engines have advanced enough to do this. There are enough popular frameworks out there to do this. The Pure javascript web applications are no longer experiments and prototypes.
Oh, and if were recommending frameworks for this, then take a look at backbone.js.
Security
Let's not forget that we do not trust the client. We need serverside validation. JavaScript is interpreted, dynamic and can be manipulated at run time. We never trust client input.
I used to mix these two approaches but then switched to client side rendering entirely because it was really hard to handle heavy JavaScript properly the otherwise. As a complete solution can recommend the approach of the JavaScriptMVC framework.
It has a view rendering engine called EJS which can compress your views into plain JavaScript for a production build of your application. That makes it extremely fast (all your HTML gets preloaded with your single compressed JavaScript file so it is rendered as soon as you receive your models JSON data). I personally couldn't notice a performance difference between EJS rendering and transferring plain HTML.
Then for your API, following the REST principles, caching is one of the key constraints. So if your application supports HTTP caching properly for JSON data and using your compressed client side templates you might even see a performance improvement.
I could be way off here, but...
Have you ever looked at CouchDB? (I have no affiliation w/ them BTW) I could be way wrong, but your situation sounds like it may be a perfect fit for the use of the Apache CouchDB I haven't really used it yet myself but I took a good look at it a short while back and it is a very interesting database.
It is a document based database that uses a REST api for connections (very versatile and easy to use). It is also very JSON centric, very fast and a tiny footprint; they say it can reside on phones and other embedded uses too but at the same time is supposed to be extremely scalable (upwards that is). If your a big JS user (which you sound like you are) then you may be right at home with it.
I was just thinking that it may come in handy in any number of ways that have been proposed here and thought I'd chime in just to give you an idea for storage options :)

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