Choosing Between Traditional Web Apps and Single Page Apps (SPAs)

“Atwood’s Law: Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.”

Jeff Atwood

Summary

There are two general approaches to building web applications today: traditional web applications that perform most of the application logic on the server, and single page applications (SPAs) that perform most of the user interface logic in a web browser, communicating with the web server primarily using web APIs. A hybrid approach is also possible, the simplest being the host one or more rich SPA-like sub-applications within a larger traditional web application.