[pphysch]

HTML gives very limited tools for tracking what a (potentially JS-less) user is doing. There are various tricks, like "link shorteners" and "magic pixels" that allow some tracking.

But if you want advanced tracking, like tracking what a user is focusing on at a particular instant, you need to wrap the whole document in a lot of JS.

SPA frameworks came out of AdTech companies like Meta, and I assure you it wasn't because they had limited engineering resources.

[blowski]

I can imagine that Facebook and Google liked the way Angular and React allowed for more advanced tracking. But it seems like you're giving too much weight to that as a primary cause.

From my memory of working through this time, it was driven more by UX designers wanting to have ever more "AJAXy" interfaces. I did a lot of freelancing for design agencies 2006 - 2016, and they all wanted these "reactive" interfaces, but building these with jQuery or vanilla JS was a nightmare. So frameworks like JavaScript MVC, Backbone.js, SproutCore, Ember.js were all popping up offering better ways of achieving it. React, Vue and Angular all evolved out of that ecosystem.

[iainmerrick]

That’s a good and logical story, but it doesn’t match the reality in my experience.

Companies use SPA frameworks for the same reason they use native apps, to make a “richer”, more responsive, more full-featured UI.

Analytics is typically done in a separate layer by a separate team, usually via Google Tag Manager. There might be a GA plugin for your UI framework, but it can work equally well with plain HTML. GA does use a bunch of client-side JS, yes, but it’s not really a framework you use on the client side, it’s just a switch you flip to turn on the data hose.

In my experience, trying to add analytics cleanly to clientside UI code is a complete pain. Trying to keep the analytics schema in sync as the UI evolves is really hard, and UI developers generally find analytics work tedious and/or objectionable and hate doing it.

Google Tag Manager is the big story in adtech, and I think it comes from and inhabits a completely different world from Angular, React etc.

[adrr]

You can do all that with vanilla html. Cursor tracking, scroll tracking. With HTMLX it makes it trivial.

React isnt a SPA framework. It’s a component framework. It has no router or even state management. ExtJs is an Mvc framework in JavaScript and can be used to create a full spa app without additional libraries. It also came out in 2007. There is also ember that also predates react and is another mvc framework by the people who did rails.

[dtagames]

This is not correct. SPAs and web components were pioneered by Google with the introduction of Angular. Later, Vue was invented by a previous Google employee who had worked on Angular. Finally, Facebook came up with React (it's a "reaction" to Angular) because they could not be seen using a Google product.

If anything, SPAs make metrics harder because they hide the real behavior of the page in local JS/TS code and don't surface as much or any information in the URL. Also, fewer server interactions means fewer opportunities to capture user behavior or affect it at the server level.

[pphysch]

A lot of misconceptions here.

Google is an AdTech company par excellence.

You don't need to do hacky URL tracking with SPAs. That's the point.

>Also, fewer server interactions means fewer opportunities to capture user behavior or affect it at the server level.

SPAs certainly do not have "fewer server interactions". What do you think an API call is?

"React" comes from "reactive web app", not "reaction to a competitor's product".

[dtagames]

I work with SPAs with API calls every day. It definitely reduces the server interactions over computing everything on that side, and it gives fewer points of contact with the server about the user's behavior. For example, many clicks and other actions will not result in any server contact at all.

I'm aware that they call it "reactive" but I'll stick with my rationale. There is no way they would use a Google product like that.

[traverseda]

I... don't believe you? Like looking at the network request of any SPA I've ever seen there's just tons of requests for even simple page loads. One for main content, one for profiles, one for comments, etc.

In theory stuff like graphql helps but in the reality I'm living in SPA's hit multiple endpoints to get render even simple pages.

[dtagames]

Definitely true, and mine do also. It's a side effect of the migration to microservices and away from monolithic endpoints.

[pphysch]

An enterprise React app I am currently working with takes about 50 requests to fully render the app post-login. Switching to another view (no reload) takes another few dozen. That's a lot of "server interactions", pretty standard for SPAs, but YMMV.

[replygirl]

your timeline is a bit off. facebook had react in production (mid-late 11) less than a year after angularjs went public, open-sourced it 18-24 months later (early 13), then evan started working on vue a few months after that (mid 13) and released early the following year

[dtagames]

Thank you. I stand corrected.

[jannes]

React was significantly better than Angular (version 1).

Please don't pretend it was merely NIH syndrome that led to its creation.

[withinboredom]

I mean, they also came out with 'flow' after MS came out with TypeScript... I def don't want to think it was NIH syndrome, but it smells fishy.

[dtagames]

But that would suffice! Facebook does not use any platforms from people who might compete with them. Why would they?

[rk06]

Fact check: Evan didn't work on angular.js, as in he was a user, not a contributor.

Source: Vue.js documentary