This blog is going to discuss the main advantages of going with a Single Page Application (SPA) Architecture built using Angular framework. We will first discuss the two most commonly asked questions about the SPA.
How Do SPA Work?
In a conventional application, the data to HTML conversion happens at the server side. Whereas the SPA handles it very differently, the data to HTML conversion is moved from server to the client side. To execute this process, SPA employs a template engine in your browser. As a result, you get a better user experience in a single page application.
Why Choose SPA Architecture?
Though SPA Architecture has been in use for a couple of years but it is yet to become widely popular. But there is a good chance that it will be a force to reckon in the near future.
SPA has been regularly used to create a private dashboard of SaaS platforms or for the internet services. Also, for creating enterprise data-driven and form-intensive applications.
This doesn’t mean all good single page applications should be based on Angular. However, there are various benefits of using Angular SPA architecture.
1. Ease of Deployment
Probably one of the biggest reasons for using the SPA is that it is extremely developer friendly to deploy in production. In comparison to the conventional server-side application, it only uses index.html file, with CSS and Javascript bundles. These can be uploaded to any of the popular content servers like Apache, Nginx, Amazon S3 or Firebase Hosting.
The application can fetch data from the backend which can be from a completely different server and is based on a different framework like Node, Java or PHP.
You can create your own REST API or use a Typescript so that the same programing language is used on both the server and client, ensuring both share the same code.
2. Ease of Versioning
The ease of versioning your build output while deploying the single page application at the frontend is a cool feature.
You simply have to configure the server parameters that specify the version of the frontend application you have built. In this scenario, the deployment can be scaled up rapidly, especially in the case of Nginx where a large number of users are involved.
A word of caution: this type of versioning is only valid for the frontend part of SPA and does not apply to the backend server.
3. Better User Experience
There is a clear cut advantage when it comes to user experience. A single page application will not constantly reload the page and go back and forth to the server to fetch all the HTML coding.
This is because SPA uses a fundamentally different architectural approach. Here only the initial page load happens post which HTML codes are not exchanged over the network.
It is the data that gets requested/sent to/from the server. And because only data is sent over the network, very less bandwidth is used which results in a better user experience.
Conclusion
We have only discussed the most prominent scenarios over here but there are going to be advancements happening on other aspects as well. It will only make the cause for choosing SPA more stronger. (e.g. the rise of SEO friendly SPA). Having said this, there are other Javascript frameworks as well which can be used to build SPA but Angular trumps them all. We will discuss this in our future blog.
