Making a Single Page App Without a Framework

The idea behind single page applications (SPA) is to create a smooth browsing experience like the one found in native desktop apps. All of the necessary code for the page is loaded only once and its content gets changed dynamically through JavaScript. If everything is done right the page shouldn’t ever reload, unless the user refreshes it manually.

Tip: Make quick and easy Single Page apps without coding by using HTML5 Data Bindings and have easy history and state management by using the HTML5 Data Bindings State Management.

There are many frameworks for single page applications out there. First we had Backbone, then Angular, now React. It takes a lot of work to constantly learn and re-learn things (not to mention having to support old code you’ve written in a long forgotten framework). In some situations, like when your app idea isn’t too complex, it is actually not that hard to create a single page app without using any external frameworks. Here is how to do it.

The Idea

We will not be using a framework, but we will be using two libraries – jQuery for DOM manipulation and event handling, and Handlebars for templates. You can easily omit these if you wish to be even more minimal, but we will use them for the productivity gains they provide. They will be here long after the hip client-side framework of the day is forgotten.

The app that we will be building fetches product data from a JSON file, and displays it by rendering a grid of products with Handlebars. After the initial load, our app will stay on the same URL and listen for changes to the hash part with the hashchange event. To navigate around the app, we will simply change the hash. This has the added benefit that browser history will just work without extra effort on our part.