Scott Gilbertson over at Wired’s Webmonkey blog has a good plain-English explanation of Christian Heilmann’s treatise on single-page apps (which gets kind of techy). Basically, web technologies today allow for websites that update themselves without the user refreshing the entire page. (Think Twitter, Facebook, et al.)
Among the benefits of single-page apps are speed gains — stripping away the HTML means there’s very little to load initially and subsequent data loads can be done in very small increments, which makes for very fast apps. With the rise of web apps targeting mobile devices the speed advantages make single-page apps appealing to developers. Indeed, Heilmann believes “single page apps … are necessary for the web to be an apps platform.”
Naturally there will be problems with the rise of apps. “We have to battle two main issues,” writes Heilmann, “old conditioning of users and sloppy development for the sake of doing something ‘new’.”
Read Christian’s whole piece for his analysis of potential problems to creating and using one-page apps.
