Are server-side MVC frameworks still relevant in single-page applications?
angularjs, javascript, restful-architecture, single-page-application
Solution
I think that the MVC frameworks are still useful into an SPA application. I am developing a SPA application, and I am using ASP .NET MVC for two things:
To Manage the first page of my application. It allows me to make use of the advantages of this framework such as the facilities for managing joining and minification of scripts.
To return the partial views that I am using in Angular. It allows me to use the razor templating, and also to manage how the partial views are catching.
I think that you can get some advantages if you mix the two things.
I hope that it helps.
Problem
In a single-page application that uses Angular, it seems like most of the things are handled on the client-side. The client seems to just make restful calls to the server. Following this concept, it seems to me that my server-side will not have any application at all, but only scripts that generate RESTful json data for the client to read. Perhaps frameworks like Hibernate or those that connects to the database are still relevant since the restful scripts on the server are going to still have to connect to the DB. But what about those MVC frameworks? Since in a single-page app the server is only required to serve RESTful calls for the client, frameworks such as Spring, Struts (in Java) or Laravel (in PHP), etc, they all are not relevant to SPAs? Which means the server side will probably just need a good RESTful library that we can work with to serve the json data and that's all? Otherwise, what would the views and controllers be on the server in a SPA?