The myth that you can’t build interactive web apps except as single page app

> I like to argue that some of the most productive days of the web were the PHP and JQuery spaghetti days

I've wondered if going back to that paradigm would be more productive or not than using React et al.

Plenty of big sites like Amazon or Steam still are made this way. Not exactly PHP + jQuery but rendering HTML on the server and sprinkling some JS on top of it.

Has anyone gone back to working like that?

I just finished migrating a fairly large legacy vue2 app to server side rendering and HTMX. Its thousands of lines less code and also hundreds if not thousands less dependencies. Most importantly I’m not worried about the tech stack becoming abandoned and un updatable in 5 years like vue2 was.

There are some pages that require more local state. Alpine.js has been great. It’s like Vuejs that you can initialize on your page and doesn’t require a build step.

How much of that code and dependency reduction is due to having the entire app to use as a spec? How can you be so sure this new stack won't be "abandoned"? (Vue has received regular updates for 11 years)

Vue 2.x is NOT receiving updates. Not even security updates. Its abandonware.

I had to ask myself if it was worth the hassle to update to 3.x and risk the same thing happening again. The answer was no.

The new stack is Django (which the backend was already written in). Will it stop receiving updates? Extremely unlikely, conserving they have been preserving upgrade paths for the last 20 years and has a solid foundation supporting it.

The supporting ui libraries like htmx and alpine could conceivably become abandoned. The big difference is that they can be vendored easily.

I checked the vue project and it has 1500 transitive dependencies. The new “stack” has a whopping total of 7.

On top of that there is no build step to maintain. Also it’s straight up way faster.