Single Page Applications

Probably a poor choice to start a topic that has such far reaching impact
as this, on a Friday afternoon. Maybe we can pick it up on Monday.

This is a natural extension of the discussion this past week about which
server architecture might be best to support single page applications, or
SPA's.

I'll begin by asking, what is a single page application? Popular terms like
SPA tend to get hijacked by anyone interested in promoting a product.

Based on my readings, SPAs are essentially static content (HTML, CSS,
JavaScript), which have UI components which adapt to "data", which may be
downloaded after the static content.

SPAs are said to be "responsive" in that pages are not "refreshed"; just
page elements which adapt visually as data is refreshed asynchronously over
the life cycle of the application.

Much of the promotion of SPAs seems to originate from frameworks like
Angular and Bootstrap, which supplement HTML with "declarative elements"
such as <tags> and <tag attributes> which are bound to JavaScript and CSS
libraries.

SPAs have far reaching implications in that traditional server-based
frameworks and tools which are designed to generate HTML, manage sessions,
and provide gateways to data appear to be superfluous; perhaps obsolete.