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Comment by lookingsideways | Hacker News Reader

> Bulletin board system gains nothing from "single page application" style architecture, it is a collection of documents, stick with it.

I'd have to say the Discourse project (http://discourse.org) provides a fantastic counter example to this. It shows what can be achieved when SPAs embrace the URL and a lot of thought is put into how the modern browser features can be used to improve the user experience rather than just jumping on the bandwagon.

Example forums:

http://meta.discourse.org http://discuss.atom.io http://discuss.emberjs.org

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Discourse emulates the normal behaviour really well, good for them. After a quick look looks like they do not suffer from the issues I mentioned before.

I just do not see any benefits going SPA style when working with data that is essentially collection of documents.

Single-page applications can change pages faster.

Sure about that? Try browsing http://forum.dlang.org/

Especially if you're in Europe (I get a ping time of 24 msec from Switzerland), the pages load nearly instantly. It's actually the sort of thing that you notice and go "whoa" it's so fast.

Yet there's nothing special about it. It's just a regular web server, written in D, that serves pages really fast (probably out of cache).

If you use HTTP caching and compression appropriately, and keep your design light, there's no particular reason you need to use Javascript to speed things up.

I'm not saying non-single-page-apps are slow, but that single-page apps can be faster in certain circumstances. When I click a link in your example I still get that slight delay, which could be eliminated with a single-page application.

not convinced discourse UX is that good either,in fact NodeBB copies a lot from discourse.

neither am I, there's a good reason people are willing to pay for older BB systems like IPBoard and vBulletin, they work and they are iteratively improved upon instead of 'UX-rebooted' like Discourse and NodeBB. I personally don't think any of the systems are perfect but the the older forums work fine as long as they are popular enough that resources are dedicated to policing them.. so I personally feel proper inter-forum karma integration should be top priority, more-so than new UXs!

This is why I prefer https://github.com/radar/forem by the "Ruby hero" Ryan Bigg. It's also for Rails but without the bells and whistles from Discourse. A.k.a. "The best Rails forum engine. Ever.", it's perfect if you want to build something unique from the ground up.

I would associate Discourse more strongly with Javascript or Ember than Rails.

You can see my app too: http://PlaysZone.com uses the same single page concept with server side rendering for the first loaded page. The other pages loads some json with ajax.

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