Nuxt is well-suited for developing single-page apps if you have any reason that prevents you from using Nuxt as a server-side rendering app. As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Nuxt comes with two modes for developing your app: universal and spa. This means you just have to specify spa in the mode property in your project configuration, which we'll explore in more detail in the next chapter.
So, you might be thinking that if we can use Nuxt for developing a SPA, then why bother with Vue anymore? In fact, the SPA you can develop from Nuxt is slightly different from the SPA from Vue. The SPA you build from Vue is a traditional SPA, while the SPA from Nuxt is a "static" SPA (let's refer to it as Nuxt SPA) – your app pages are pre-rendered at build time. This means deploying a Nuxt SPA is technically the same as statically generating a Nuxt universal SSR app – both require the same Nuxt command: nuxt generate.
This can be confusing and you may want to ask what is the difference between the static-generated SSR app and the static-generated SPA? The difference is very obvious – the static-generated SPA has no page content compared to the static-generated SSR app. The static-generated SPA is pre-rendered with your app pages and "empty" HTML, just like the traditional SPA – devoid of page content. This is confusing, but rest assured, we will figure all this out in the upcoming chapters of this book. In particular, you learn about the trade-offs of developing SPAs in Nuxt and how to overcome them.
You'll learn how to develop a Nuxt SPA and generate a static Nuxt SPA with a remote API in Chapter 15, Creating an SPA with Nuxt.
