Introducing Single Page Applications

Abstract

A single page application (SPA) is a web application that uses only one HTML web page as a shell for all the application's web pages and whose end-user interactions are implemented by using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Most of the SPA development is done on the front end as opposed to traditional web applications that rely heavily on web server interactions and that reload new web pages whenever navigation occurs. SPAs resemble native applications in their behavior and development but they run inside a browser process as opposed to native applications, which run in their own process. In order to understand why SPA development is so trendy today, we need to understand the changes that happened in the web environment that led to today's SPAs. In this chapter you will learn a little bit about web development history and reasons to build SPAs in the first place.