I generally agree with the article, but the examples of javascript web apps that were given seem weak:
> Most web apps I work with daily have highly sophisticated in-browser interactions that are built with JavaScript and can only be built with JavaScript: Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, GMail etc
The web apps that I use the most day-to-day are Trello, Slack and Gitter. IMHO, those are better examples of js bringing actual value to the table that progressive enhancement simply cannot.
With that being said, the issue of overusing SPA technology when it doesn't fit the need is definitely real.
Part of the issue comes from people wanting to pad their resumes w/ experience in "hot" technology, or people who do have a genuine interest in improving their skills, but are not very skilled in identifying the pros and cons of whatever "new hotness" or "best practice" they read on their favorite news aggregators. By extension these creates an industry for grunt work to maintain/refactor/rewrite everchanging codebases/frameworks. Coupled with the general tendency of people to favor new shrink-wrapped libraries over doing good ol' painstaking research, it's difficult to reverse that trend.
For me they are tools for work and they are the web apps that I use the most every day (I work remotely). Trello is a task management system where you organize tasks as drag-n-drop "cards" and Slack/Gitter are chat apps (Slack is for company chat and Gitter is for my open source project community).
I do use Youtube/Facebook/Twitter etc as well, but I use them primarily for content consumption for entertainment, so my usage patterns of those services wouldn't be affected much if they were written without using javascript at all. In contrast, drag-n-drop and the ability for real-time collaboration are the killer feature of Trello (for me), and obviously there's no way web chat would ever work smoothly without js.
> Most web apps I work with daily have highly sophisticated in-browser interactions that are built with JavaScript and can only be built with JavaScript: Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, GMail etc
The web apps that I use the most day-to-day are Trello, Slack and Gitter. IMHO, those are better examples of js bringing actual value to the table that progressive enhancement simply cannot.
With that being said, the issue of overusing SPA technology when it doesn't fit the need is definitely real.
Part of the issue comes from people wanting to pad their resumes w/ experience in "hot" technology, or people who do have a genuine interest in improving their skills, but are not very skilled in identifying the pros and cons of whatever "new hotness" or "best practice" they read on their favorite news aggregators. By extension these creates an industry for grunt work to maintain/refactor/rewrite everchanging codebases/frameworks. Coupled with the general tendency of people to favor new shrink-wrapped libraries over doing good ol' painstaking research, it's difficult to reverse that trend.