Nobody actually makes single page apps in a single page anymore, do they? Some are saying they should really be called native web apps, which sounds fine to me. Anyway, coincidentally two readers sent me their own single page app libraries. They both build applications from separate files, but work in quite different ways.

Griffin.yo (jgauffin/griffin.yo, License: Apache 2.0) by Jonas Gauffin is a framework written in TypeScript that supports templates, view models, routing, and caching of server-side data.

Once views and models have been loaded they are cached in the browser (the cache is emptied if the browser is reloaded). Thus as long as the user continues to use the site as a SPA application everything is only loaded once from the server.

There's a blog post about Griffin.yo that introduces the main ideas, and the examples are written with TypeScript. It uses a project structure that is similar to many other web frameworks. I don't think there's a project generator, so follow the quick start guide if you want to try it out.

The other SPA project I was sent recently is Igaro App (GitHub: igaro/app, License: GPL). The author, Andrew Charnley, claims it's faster than AngularJS, and the current version is 1.0.0.

The thing that makes Igaro different is it's HTML-free. It avoids using DOM query selector methods to try to improve performance, and therefore has no template engine. Instead it uses routes to build pages, and standard CSS for styling and layout.

There's a DOM element creation API, so you can make elements in a way that reminds me of React:

model.managers.dom.mk('p', wrapper,_tr('Localized string'), 'myClassName');  

Objects created by Igaro are decorated with features for two-way parent-child event management, and dependency tracking. You can do this to arbitrary objects by using the bless method. Bless could be used to make widgets that work with Igaro apps.

In terms of ES6 support, Igaro makes heavy use of promises, which makes sense. Given the use of string fragments over templates, I expected to see ES6 template strings. I couldn't find any examples of template strings in Igaro, but given that it has a Grunt-based build system I don't think it would be too hard to add Babel to an Igaro project.

You can see examples in the documentation: all of the documentation pages are written with Igaro, and if you click the curly braces at the top of the page you'll see the raw JavaScript that's used to generate the page.

I think the paradigm shift to "native web apps" is the right way forward for single page web apps. Rather than the community settling into Angular or React it seems like we're making more libraries – and more creative libraries – than ever!