What is an MPA?
I’ve been thinking a lot about web applications recently and these days, …for better or worse, we have plenty of options to choose from. Yes React, Vue, and Angular have been marketed into the mainstream, but a niche of talented developers solving a new set of problems and use-cases have begun to approach web application development without SPA-first in mind (most of us have built an SPA at some point or the other)
So, what exactly is an MPA? Mistakenly, many web application developers lean into the tendency of calling their web apps SPAs, but in reality there are many differences. An MPA is a multi page application, a website, consisting of multiple pages which are mostly rendered on the server. MPAs are more traditional in the sense that navigating to a new page causes your browser to request a new page of HTML from the server (unlike SPAs which which download JavaScript to the browser and then render HTML locally). So, in an SPA after the initial load everything is handled in JavaScript while MPAs defer JavaScript loading until when you begin interacting with the user interface. Both architectures have their pros and cons, and I can discuss my point of view in more depth in a later post. I wouldn't create your next website or application as an MPA just because it’s the shiny new object, or because the creators of MPAs website might look cool, but rather carefully weigh out my options as you learn more about the architecture and framework.
The most notable difference in an MPA vs traditional web applications (Django, Wordpress, Ruby on Rails, etc) is that JavaScript is universal, meaning that the server is also written in JavaScript - everything is one language. A few ultra-modern MPAs to check out and I'm sure there will be more coming:
If you’ve read any of Ray Dalio, you’ll realize that much of everything in life has a cycles, human beings, the economy and the same rule applies to software and tech. It feels like we’re moving forwards and then backwards, re-inventing the wheel while architecting new solutions that cause more problems that we weren’t aware of at the time.