SPA example application with AngularJS and requireJS as a comparison to the ROCA Spring variant
About three weeks ago, Tobias Flohre published his blog post about a real ROCA application. He has shown that a ROCA application can be developed with ease by utilising tools that have been available (and stable) for a while now. Additionally, the Single-Page Application (SPA) architecture was questioned. With this blog post, I wish to address these questions.
At codecentric we have had quite a few discussions about both, the ROCA and SPA approach. While trying to identify a superior front-end architecture, we came to the conclusion that no architectural style is inherently superior, but that both have strengths and weaknesses. Decisions regarding the architecture therefore need to be made on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless, we wanted to compare both styles using a small application. This application is the movie database, i.e. the application which was introduced in Tobias Flohre’s article.
When talking about SPAs I am referring to applications which are running in a browser. I further differentiate between architectures that hide the web’s concepts from the developer and the ones which actually utilise HTML, CSS, JavaScript and HTTP. While Vaadin and others fall into the former category, this blog post covers the latter, i.e. architectures which appreciate the web’s concepts, flexibility and even its shortcomings. Plainly said: we write JavaScript!
