Ask HN: “Multi Page App” design/architecture/advice? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: “Multi Page App” design/architecture/advice?

10 points_------------_5 comments

For context, I find SPAs overrated, over engineered and complicated as hell to manage for 99% of the projects/businesses that use them. Let's leave them out and let's leave out any specific languages/frameworks.

I have built a solo side project that makes $XX,XXX/MRR and it was done with a very popular server rendered web framework. I am in the middle of building a second solo business, but this project requires quite a lot more performance and after building a prototype using the previous web framework, I have confirmed it would be difficult (ie, expensive) to scale to meet the needs of the service I am building.

I have built my own "multi page app" solution from the ground up with another language/technology that far surpasses the performance requirements. I'm at the point where I'd like to learn more about multi page apps from the fundamental level so I can ensure my multi page app solution has a solid base (security, performance, reusability, etc). Therefore enabling me to use and reuse it for all of my businesses going forward.

I'm having a hard time finding solid resources that discuss security, architecture and other considerations for "old school server rendered pages". I'd like to learn a lot more so have a very solid base for my project and future projects!

Are there any good resources out there you'd recommend?

For MPAs security is as "simple" as:

- Throwing away everything you don't need. - Don't trust inputs. Actually you shouldn't trust anything - not even this comment. - Since you dont trust inputs, add a version tag for all you input because your app will evolve. - Sanitize all input (ints should be ints, not drop database strings for instance). - Assume system/framework/service calls can fail. Log that. - Check your routes. Some frameworks expose routes that you didn't knew about until some bastard asks Googlebot the path to remove some data and drives you mad for weeks. - Remember to log all input data for further analysis. Well, maybe not all; but 1-5% of all (and tell users about that and dont' use that data for other stuff).

For me Javascript is good for small stuff. Maybe a simple "micro" service that updates something is good. Angular, React, and friends are too much for me because I need too much stuff to debug a simple app.

And don't misjudge the programmer time. Some frameworks allow you to start iterating quickly, but debugging is a nightmare. Also, don't use two (or more) technologies at the same time that you are still learning. One is fine, but learning two at the same time makes debugging #@!ng hard.

Eh? There's stacks upon stacks of books and web sites written about traditional MVC frameworks...

OP probably just didn’t know the term to search for was “MVC”.

check out laravel. It's a modern PHP MVC framework and it's very easy to use.

Postgres + gobuffalo.io + turbolinks + stimulusjs might work fo your requirements. IMHO this will scale pretty well for most projects while giving you enough frontend magic to still feel fast.

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