Single Page Applications (SPA) are growing as a popular web design. They differ from other web applications in that these pages do not refresh entirely unless the user chooses to do so. Instead, different features of the web page make calls to the web server, and the results are injected into the current Document resulting in a look and feel rivaling that if a thick client application.
Key to making this possible, as must developers know, is the use of JavaScript and AJAX allowing individual events to be fired by the web application, and handled by the browser itself. Sometimes the events are handled completely in the browser. Sometimes the events require a trip back to the web server, and the results are presented by inserting or replacing the results into the current HTML document.
With the continued implementation of the HTML5 specification into modern browsers the browser is quickly becoming a first class tool capable of performing a lot of work previously on capable on a web server platform.
Are you moving toward the Single Page Application model? If so, are you integrating it into your existing applications, or creating a separate application altogether? What are the issues you have found transitioning your team to the SPA model?
Share your thoughts here or by dropping an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben