Ask HN: Experience increased breakages with advent of SPAs?

2 pointsfoofoo4u2y ago1 comments

Is it just me? Or does it seem like online web portals are more brittle now and days? I've noticed nearly everything, from my local credit union, to my gas utilities company, to my lease web portal, are all written as SPAs. And I see little reason for them. They mostly need to render and input basic information. Seems like engineering overkill. And as a result, I find they are always broken in some fashion. Pages fail to fully load. Back button introduces broken state. All kinds of other wonky behavior. I don't remember sites being as broken as this in the past when they were written as MPAs.

1 comments

PaulHoule2y ago

I like to bitch about SPAs, maybe working on one gives me some cred.

I was in on a call today and we were talking about some open source software from CERN which got me looking at their library catalog which is SPA-based and boy is it sweet...

https://catalogue.library.cern/

It is interesting in many respects in that it deviates from the standards of American librarianship that I've been involved in. (Seemingly no MARC records, no Dewey or LoC classifications...) Note that many LMS are derived from telnet-based systems so when you "start a session" it opens up a long-running process in the back end system which is linked to your browser with a cookie which can introduce all sorts of wonkiness as opposed to the more usual "stateless" approach you see in commercial web IR systems.

That particular product though strikes me as a real improvement over the status quo in that field.

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