In the past, I had
blogged about the categorization of UI frameworks and the design philosophy behind them.
Of late, the open source market has been flooded with a plethora of
SPA (Single Page Application) JavaScript frameworks. Most of these frameworks implement the MVC, MVP or the MVVP patterns on the client side and integrate with the back-end services using REST & JSON.
We are evaluating the following frameworks, that have gained popularity over the past few months. IMHO,
Gmail is still the best SPA application out there :)
http://spinejs.com/
http://knockoutjs.com/
http://durandaljs.com/ (based on knockout.js)
http://angularjs.org/ (Google's baby for SPA)
http://backbonejs.org/
http://marionettejs.com/ (based on backboneJS)
http://emberjs.com/
A good comparison of the various frameworks is given
here. IMHO, so many frameworks cause a lot of confusion and developers spend a lot of time comparing the features and choosing the best fit.
In SPA, all of the HTML, JS and CSS is downloaded in the first request. All subsequent requests are AJAX requests and only retrieve data from services and update the UI. The browser loads the JS files, requests the data from servies and then generates the HTML DOM dynamically.
The obvious advantage of SPA is the high performance of the web application and the seamless look-n-feel of the website as that of an mobile app. For SPA, there are challenges around SEO and browser history (back button) that needs to be addressed within the app.