Part 1. Introducing SPAs

In the time it takes to read this page, 35 million person minutes will be spent waiting for traditional website pages to load. That’s enough spinning icon time for the Curiosity Lander to fly to Mars and back 96 times. The productivity cost of traditional websites is astonishing, and the cost to a business can be devastating. A slow website can drive users away from your site—and into the welcoming wallets of smiling competitors.

One reason traditional websites are slow is because popular MVC server frameworks are focused on serving page after page of static content to an essentially dumb client. When we click a link in a traditional website slideshow, for example, the screen flashes white and everything reloads over several seconds: the navigation, ads, headlines, text, and footer are all rendered again. Yet the only thing that changes is the slideshow image and perhaps the description text. Worse, there’s no indicator when some element of the page becomes functional. For example, sometimes a link can be clicked as soon as it appears on a web page; other times we have to wait until the redrawing is 100% complete plus five seconds. This slow, inconsistent, and clunky experience is becoming unacceptable for an increasingly sophisticated web consumer.