Designing Efficient Single Page Web Applications

Abstract

Traditional web applications rely on the client-server model to request and render data on the browser. Although this architecture has been popular for over a decade, waiting for information as the server caters to different types of clients makes the user experience appear to be slow. Client-side machines have computing capabilities, that when used can share the computing load with the servers. Contemporary single page applications take advantage of these client-side machines to minimize the delay by providing client-end software with the capabilities of requesting only required data from the server and updating only portions of the presented information, without constant redundant data being on the network. This study provides an initial design approach for contemporary applications. The proposed design approach helps developers to analyze all the aspects of the application that needs to be built – architecture, file structure, separation of code, and distribution of computing between client and servers. This study also provides a step–by-step method for designing contemporary applications. An application was built using the proposed method to validate the proposed design approach.