Single Page Application: advantages and disadvantages [closed]

Question

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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..).