November 2019
Intermediate to advanced
343 pages
8h 59m
English
Content preview from Web Development with Node and Express, 2nd Edition
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 16. Single-Page Applications
The term single-page application (SPA) is something of a misnomer, or it is at least confusing two meanings of the word “page.” SPAs, from the user’s perspective, can (and usually do) still appear to have different pages: the home page, the Vacations page, the About page, and so on. As a matter of fact, you could create a traditional server-side rendered application and an SPA that were indistinguishable to the user.
The “single page” has more to do with where and how the HTML is constructed than the user’s experience. In an SPA, the server delivers a single HTML bundle when the user first loads the application,1 and any changes in the UI (which may appear as different pages to the user) are the result of JavaScript manipulating the DOM in response to user activity or network events.
SPAs still need to communicate frequently with the server, but HTML is usually only sent as part of that first request. After that, only JSON data and static assets are transferred between the client and server.
Understanding the reason for this now-dominant approach to web application development requires a little history….
A Short History of Web Application Development
The way we approach web development has undergone a massive shift in the last 10 years, but one thing has remained relatively consistent: the components involved in a website or web application. Namely:
-
HTML and the Document Object Model (DOM)
-
JavaScript
-
CSS
-
Static assets (generally multimedia: ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.