Building Single-Page Applications (SPAs) with Client-Side JavaScript Frameworks

JavaScript client frameworks have flourished primarily based on the initial success and popularity of jQuery. There are now dozens of quality frameworks you can use to solve all kinds of issues building websites, single-page applications (SPAs), and even mobile applications (see Chapter 25, “Writing Cross-Platform Mobile Applications with Apache Cordova”). Most of these frameworks simplify what are otherwise difficult tasks to accomplish with JavaScript.

Alongside the rise in JavaScript frameworks came the adoption of the SPA. An SPA by its strict definition is a web application that loads a single page and then responds to user activity to chunk or push page updates to the browser. This is akin to a native application that loads a primary screen and then shows subscreens or modal dialogs contained within the primary window.

In reality, however, most modern web applications use the techniques of an SPA and not its strict definition. You might, for instance, create a website based on various features for orders, customers, and shipments. Instead of one SPA to manage these items, you might write a more standard site and then use the techniques of SPA within a given subarea of the application (manage orders, for example).

This section introduces the rich set of client libraries available for building modern sites. We then show how to use a few of these frameworks inside of Visual Studio and ASP.NET to solve certain scenarios.