Introducing single-page applications

Single-Page Applications (or SPAs) is a broad term that came about to simply describe the behavior of some solutions meant to create web UIs in a lighter, more modern way. The first characteristic of the SPA is the one that it relates to the name. An SPA, in general, bundles all the assets necessary to start user interaction into a single HTML document and sends it to the client.

All the following interactions between the client and the server, including loading data, sending data back, and loading other assets (as images or CSS files), are performed within the page using JavaScript. For this reason, SPAs minimize the communication between the client and server (improving performances), avoid the full-page refresh, and allow for a simpler architectural model.

Indeed, a basic, static file-serving web server (such as Apache HTTPD or NGINX) is all you need on the frontend (no Java application server is needed). Moreover, the interaction between...