Single Page Application: advantages and disadvantages

Question

I've read about SPA and it advantages. I find most of them unconvincing. There are 3 advantages that arouse my doubts.

Question:

Answer 1

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