Single Page application Design

PREFACE

Before there was Angular or React, I worked through developing a single page that managed the view of divs. The design showed & hid various divs on a single page. Since the divs were all on the same page, they shared the page's cache. This provided a very speedy experience for users. Communications with the server were conducted through a web worker and predictive pre-fethcing of content that included remotely stored content and code. This was the precursor to the Frame(s)work.

Angular started as an amalgamation of jQuery, Knockout, and Bootstrap and transformed into a complete solution that complicated the entire web application development process with web packs, compilation and dependencies. React started in much the same way, but the focus was much more like object-oriented programming of components. They use complicated methods to manage basic available resources: Cached Variable Data, or Local Storage, or Web Workers. 

So why are these javascript frameworks so popular? IMHO, it is the lack of STRUCTURE within the browser programming. Much like a computer having RAM, CPU, and Hard-Drive, the browser processes HTML, JS, and CSS. These elements are the basic foundations available for programming. The frameworks are attempts to introduce programming structures to leverage the base technology elements.

Development & Design

As I discussed in my white paper regarding the Biztalks Platform, websites have remained the same since its early days ('94). Websites are a great concept for sharing information accessible around the globe. But the web has become something different than the document-sharing platform shared by academics and researchers.

Today, the web has become a place where people work, which means we need to provide web applications for productivity. Most web applications are interfaces to databases and web APIs. This means that there are very basic requirements for data input and presentation. What makes software complicated is the navigation for where to input data and how to visualize extracted data. 

Enter design... Design is a very valuable contribution to a website. 

Design is not always aware of the work efforts associated with their designs. Often designs can create additional complications and complexity to the development, that feature development can exceed the most accommodating deadlines. In short, if design is not working 'hand and hand' with development, they can add time and cost to developing the software they have designed.