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Comment by onaworkcomputer | Hacker News Reader

> The distinct advantage of an SPA is that, done correctly, cached data lets you render pages instantly.

Yeah, but full page caching is a thing, and in my experience, teams writing traditional server-rendered pages are much more aggressive in their use of response caching than are teams writing JSON APIs. Honestly, a Rails/Django/Laravel app with smart caching headers and a Varnish instance in front feels more reliably instantaneous than the bespoke caching solutions each SPA seems to invent for itself.

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How does that work if a user is logged in and private data is visible on the page?

I’m thinking of building something that only renders public data on the server, and then later gets that which pertains to individuals through an API. But I don’t want to spend more time on a lot of complicated plumbing than on core functionality in my application.

A SPA seems like the path of least resistance here, since all you have to do is put the appropriate cache control headers on your API endpoints, and let the browser abstract it away for you. I know programmers like to build bespoke caching solutions, been there, done that, but you don’t actually need to.

My biggest gripe with SPAs is the overhead of building and maintaining an API for everything, but GraphQL takes away a lot of that pain.

GraphQL is a protocol, as such it cannot take away the pain of creating a backend for your frontend.

There are tools which make the creation of the backend painless and utilize GraphQL for sure (i.e hasura), but claiming that GraphQL solved that issue is nonsensical, because writing the GraphQL API is generally way more annoying then the equivalent rest API is

Yes, I obviously mean leverage the existing tools, not roll my own implementation of the protocol, that would just be stupid and counter-productive.

Equivalent tools for REST and non-REST HTTP do exist, but none that I've seen has been as cohesive as for instance Apollo. I used it on a small side project and was amazed at how much time and effort it saved me. The alternatives are a patchwork of different tools with slightly different goals for things like client code generation, documentation generation, playgrounds, HATEOAS, etc. that have to each be evaluated and shoehorned in with the others.

I've seen a lot of projects that use a full response cache to capture a view with holes where user-specific information would go and then fill in those holes with some client side JS. I wouldn't call those SPAs, though.

But I'd say it's more common to just use "private" cache headers in this case for any page that differs for logged in vs unauthenticated users. The user's browser will still serve as a full page cache, but shared caches will ignore those pages.

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