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by const_cast 414 days ago
No you really don’t. I’ve worked on exceptionally complex legacy applications with essentially no state in the front end. At most, you’re looking at query parameters. You just make everything a full page reload and you’re good to go.
2 comments
balencpp 414 days ago
So you make incrementing a counter a full page reload?
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ysavir 414 days ago
You don't need an SPA to handle incrementing a counter. If a page needs dynamic behavior you add JS to it, whether it's just adding an in-memory counter or an API call to store and retrieve some data. It's not difficult to write JavaScript.

The problem with SPAs is that they force having to maintain a JS-driven system on every single page, even those that don't have dynamic behavior.

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lelanthran 413 days ago
> You don't need an SPA to handle incrementing a counter. If a page needs dynamic behavior you add JS to it, whether it's just adding an in-memory counter or an API call to store and retrieve some data. It's not difficult to write JavaScript.

I agree with this. Sprinkle in the JS as and when it is needed.

> The problem with SPAs is that they force having to maintain a JS-driven system on every single page, even those that don't have dynamic behavior.

I don't agree with this: SPAs don't force "... having to maintain a JS-driven system on every single page..."

SPA frameworks do.

I think it's possible to do reasonably simple SPAs without a written-completely-in-JSX-with-Typescript-and-a-5-step-build-process-that-won't-work-without-25-npm-dependencies.

I'm currently trying out a front-end mechanism to go with my high-velocity back-end mechanism. I think I've got a good story sorted out, but it's early days and while I have used my exploratory prototype in production, I've only recently iterated it into a tiny and neat process that has no build-step, no npm, and no JS requirement for the page author. All it uses is `<script src=...>` in the `<head>`, with no more JS on the rest of the page.

Very limited though, but it's still early days.

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ysavir 413 days ago
A codebase doesn't need that toolset to be an SPA. An SPA is just a website where all the site's functionality is done on the "root page", and it uses JS to load the data, handle navigation, etc. Doesn't matter whether that's all done through React in TypeScript and compiled by Vite or by handrolled JavaScript fetched in .js files.
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lelanthran 413 days ago
> A codebase doesn't need that toolset to be an SPA.

That's kinda the goal I'm trying to reach. If you know of any SPA that doesn't come with all the baggage and only uses `<script src=...>`, by all means let me know.

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Capricorn2481 414 days ago
That's still state on the frontend, which the commenter claimed sites don't need.
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ysavir 414 days ago
True, I shouldn't have said in memory. As the GP mentioned, you can store the counter value in a URL param. There are ways to achieve dynamic behavior without having to load or store values into JS memory.
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procaryote 413 days ago
That is more work both for the developers and the servers though. You need to re-render the whole page every change, rather than make a local change (or a tiny request if it needs to persist)
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ysavir 413 days ago
You misunderstood what I was saying. I was saying that you could write some plain old JS to catch an event on incrementing and updated the URL and the UI, and some JS to get the data from the URL on page load to set the UI. No new server render, and that's maybe 5 minutes of writing JavaScript code (compared to, say, setting up react project and instantiating that whole beast from the page root until reaching the specific UI element that needs to be dynamic).
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const_cast 414 days ago
What's the business usecase for incrementing a counter?

We can sit here all day and think up counterexamples, but in the real world what you're doing 99% of the time is:

1. Presenting a form, custom or static.

2. Filling out that form.

3. Loading a new page based off that form.

When I open my bank app or website, this is 100% of the experience. When I open my insurance company website, this is 100% of the experience. Hell, when I open apartments.com, this is like 98% of the experience. The 2% is that 3D view thingy they let you do.

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lelanthran 413 days ago
> What's the business usecase for incrementing a counter?

Notification count in the top right?

Remaining credit on an interactive service (like the ChatGPT web interface)?

So, maybe two(!) business use-cases out of thousands, but it's a pretty critical two use-cases.

I agree with you though - do all normal HTML form submissions, and for those two use-cases use `setInterval` to set them from a `fetch` every $X minutes (where you choose the value for $X).

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yawaramin 408 days ago
Notification incrementing is not purely client-side state though. It's triggered by an event coming from a server. Eg let's say you're on a product page and you click 'Add to Cart'. You want the cart icon's counter badge on the top right corner of the page to increment. With eg htmx when you click 'Add to Cart' we send a request to the server, it updates the cart state in the backend, then sends an HTML fragment response that updates the necessary parts of the page, including the cart item counter badge.
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const_cast 413 days ago
In my experience it's just exceedingly rare to require this. My insurance company website has a notification thing, and it's actually static. You need to refresh the page, and considering how few and far between notifications are, and how common refreshes are, it works fine.

There's an entire domain of apps where you truly need a front-end. Any desktop-like application. Like Google Sheets, or Figma. Where the user feedback loop is incredibly tight for most operations.

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phoronixrly 414 days ago
Let's be honest -- the alternative is an API call with poor or no error-handling with the brilliant UX of either hanging with an endless loading indicator, or just flat out lying that the counter was incremented...
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ziml77 414 days ago
> or just flat out lying that the counter was incremented...

Which is what HN does and it sucks. It's very common for me to vote on a couple things and then after navigating around I come back to see that there are comments that don't have a vote assigned.

Of course the non-JS version would be even more annoying. I would never click those vote buttons if every vote caused a full page refresh.

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procaryote 414 days ago
That sounds like the most basic of experiences...
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