6 ms·

Show HN: Spar - Single Page Application Rocketship

29 points by mhodgson 14y ago

mpobrien 14y ago
The stars animation behind that logo seems to be using quite a bit of CPU...
- napillo 14y ago
  That's because it's a >200kb 2000x1000 transparent png file. Yea, it hogs my CPU as well.
- napillo 14y ago
  That's because it's a >200kb 2000x1000 transparent png file. Yea, it hogs my CPU as well.
- antonwinter 14y ago
  seems like a good excuse to buy a new shiney laptop to me
dmix 14y ago
I currently use http://middlemanapp.com/ http://middlemanapp.com/ to accomplish this. It works really well.
- aaronwhite 14y ago
  Middleman looks great; Spar attempts to help on deployment as well as development. Excited to see folks building/using frameworks like these.
doublerebel 14y ago
The concept is great. I use Spine.app for this myself. A nodejs stack makes more sense to me because the app itself is powered by JavaScript, not Ruby, and then I am truly decoupled from other languages. However, I can see why someone coming from Ruby would prefer Spar -- even Spine.app includes Sprockets support for Ruby devs.
- aaronwhite 14y ago
  Spar itself requires no knowledge of Ruby, that was one of the design goals. It happens to use Ruby tech under-the-hood, but no user of Spar would ever be exposed to those choices.
whalesalad 14y ago
The outerspace background is totally the killing the 'rocketship' paradigm. It kills scrolling performance and uses quite a bit of CPU. Then again a rocketship uses tons and tons of fuel so perhaps this is intentional? =)
- efields 14y ago
  Winner!
vineet 14y ago
Some of the story behind Spar: http://www.slideshare.net/wyrmwood/ultramodern-frontend-dev-introducing-spar http://www.slideshare.net/wyrmwood/ultramodern-frontend-dev-...
brian_c 14y ago
I really want to like this, but I can't get behind Sprockets when RequireJS and Browserify exist. Code in comments, obtuse file extensions, `require_tree`, etc. make code modularization an inelegant kludge.
ajacksified 14y ago
This is a ridiculous concept and the opposite of "modern" web development, as it purports to be. Maybe I'm using a different definition of "modern" - it seems here that it means "using new shiny things" rather than "using accumulated knowledge of web development patterns to build the best user experience." But, I digress. There is a massive gap here, and with any framework that is purely client-side. Here's what you get if you serve html from the server: * SEO. You can't crawl a page that loads purely over Javascript. Google has an API to allow access to ajaxed-in pages, but that means modifying you code to fit exactly what each crawler needs. Not going to happen. * Better accessibility. Yes, some screen readers handle Javascript now, but many don't. * Page performance. Time-to-usability on a page served by a server is several orders of magnitude faster than when you load javascript, then load data, then render the page. If the server can serve html, you can start using the page while the scripts load and initialize in the background. If performance isn't a big deal, you want to make awkward hacks to force SEO to work, and you don't care about reaching all possible people? Build a single-page-app and nothing else. I'm not saying don't make a single-page app; I'm saying be smart about it. You've got two steps out of three - building an API and a single-page app. The missing middle step is building a second server side app that reads from that API (RESTful, right?) and bootstraps the page, which is built using language-agnostic templates like Mustache. Then, you load your Backbone/whatever JS on top, which takes over, and points at your api. It's easy to do with something like Node that can even share the same code to build pages.
- VeejayRampay 14y ago
  "This is a ridiculous concept". How nice and friendly of you.
- aaronwhite 14y ago
  Your opening digression is a bit harsh. We're all experienced web-devs, with the accumulated knowledge of building websites that have reached in excess of several hundred million individuals. SEO - True. There are many different strategies to deliver solid SEO results using technologies like Spar. You can use headless browsers to pre-render and deliver on-demand rendered content, if you know your URL space completely, you can pre-render all documents. Spar isn't an attempt to solve SEO for you, you may not even care if you are building a phone-gap app, for instance. So does that invalidate the technology? Accessibility: I'm 100% behind accessibility, and if the compatible tricks don't work... do you still make your site accessible for IE3? No... screen- readers MUST catch up. We can all do what we can to help, but shouldn't engineer for the past, which is an orthogonal concern from accessibile technology choices. Page-performance - I'll challenge the several orders of magnitude claim, we've seen incredible performance w/ the approach, and best-case you're only talking about first-page speed, even ceding that it becomes a much different story later on... and if you're building an 'app' thats a big difference.

29 points by mhodgson 14y ago

mpobrien 14y ago

The stars animation behind that logo seems to be using quite a bit of CPU...

napillo 14y ago
That's because it's a >200kb 2000x1000 transparent png file. Yea, it hogs my CPU as well.
napillo 14y ago
That's because it's a >200kb 2000x1000 transparent png file. Yea, it hogs my CPU as well.
antonwinter 14y ago
seems like a good excuse to buy a new shiney laptop to me

dmix 14y ago

I currently use http://middlemanapp.com/ http://middlemanapp.com/ to accomplish this. It works really well.

aaronwhite 14y ago
Middleman looks great; Spar attempts to help on deployment as well as development. Excited to see folks building/using frameworks like these.

doublerebel 14y ago

The concept is great. I use Spine.app for this myself. A nodejs stack makes more sense to me because the app itself is powered by JavaScript, not Ruby, and then I am truly decoupled from other languages. However, I can see why someone coming from Ruby would prefer Spar -- even Spine.app includes Sprockets support for Ruby devs.

aaronwhite 14y ago
Spar itself requires no knowledge of Ruby, that was one of the design goals. It happens to use Ruby tech under-the-hood, but no user of Spar would ever be exposed to those choices.

whalesalad 14y ago

The outerspace background is totally the killing the 'rocketship' paradigm. It kills scrolling performance and uses quite a bit of CPU. Then again a rocketship uses tons and tons of fuel so perhaps this is intentional? =)

efields 14y ago
Winner!

vineet 14y ago

Some of the story behind Spar: http://www.slideshare.net/wyrmwood/ultramodern-frontend-dev-introducing-spar http://www.slideshare.net/wyrmwood/ultramodern-frontend-dev-...

brian_c 14y ago

I really want to like this, but I can't get behind Sprockets when RequireJS and Browserify exist. Code in comments, obtuse file extensions, `require_tree`, etc. make code modularization an inelegant kludge.

ajacksified 14y ago

This is a ridiculous concept and the opposite of "modern" web development, as it purports to be. Maybe I'm using a different definition of "modern" - it seems here that it means "using new shiny things" rather than "using accumulated knowledge of web development patterns to build the best user experience." But, I digress. There is a massive gap here, and with any framework that is purely client-side. Here's what you get if you serve html from the server: * SEO. You can't crawl a page that loads purely over Javascript. Google has an API to allow access to ajaxed-in pages, but that means modifying you code to fit exactly what each crawler needs. Not going to happen. * Better accessibility. Yes, some screen readers handle Javascript now, but many don't. * Page performance. Time-to-usability on a page served by a server is several orders of magnitude faster than when you load javascript, then load data, then render the page. If the server can serve html, you can start using the page while the scripts load and initialize in the background. If performance isn't a big deal, you want to make awkward hacks to force SEO to work, and you don't care about reaching all possible people? Build a single-page-app and nothing else. I'm not saying don't make a single-page app; I'm saying be smart about it. You've got two steps out of three - building an API and a single-page app. The missing middle step is building a second server side app that reads from that API (RESTful, right?) and bootstraps the page, which is built using language-agnostic templates like Mustache. Then, you load your Backbone/whatever JS on top, which takes over, and points at your api. It's easy to do with something like Node that can even share the same code to build pages.

VeejayRampay 14y ago
"This is a ridiculous concept". How nice and friendly of you.
aaronwhite 14y ago
Your opening digression is a bit harsh. We're all experienced web-devs, with the accumulated knowledge of building websites that have reached in excess of several hundred million individuals. SEO - True. There are many different strategies to deliver solid SEO results using technologies like Spar. You can use headless browsers to pre-render and deliver on-demand rendered content, if you know your URL space completely, you can pre-render all documents. Spar isn't an attempt to solve SEO for you, you may not even care if you are building a phone-gap app, for instance. So does that invalidate the technology? Accessibility: I'm 100% behind accessibility, and if the compatible tricks don't work... do you still make your site accessible for IE3? No... screen- readers MUST catch up. We can all do what we can to help, but shouldn't engineer for the past, which is an orthogonal concern from accessibile technology choices. Page-performance - I'll challenge the several orders of magnitude claim, we've seen incredible performance w/ the approach, and best-case you're only talking about first-page speed, even ceding that it becomes a much different story later on... and if you're building an 'app' thats a big difference.