Xenforo & Single-Page Applications (SPAs)

[AliS]

Hello there,

I have noticed that the current trend for websites is to use single-page architecture as a front-end. This architecture is supported by many well-known frameworks, like Angular (or AngularJS). One major advantage of it is that it is REALLY fast. You can feel how fast these frameworks are by visiting the following links:

• NodeBB
• Discourse

The page does not have to reload each time you click on a link. Instead, part of the page is updated dynamically, which makes it much faster than normal HTTP request. Honestly, I started to feel that any website that does not use these frameworks is out-dated.

My question is: although XenForo has a great developers community, why we have not seen yet any add-on that serves this purpose? In addition, why XenForo is NOT Single-Page App yet? Any promises in XenForo 2.0?

Thank you,

 

[Sim]

One of the main benefits of XenForo is its ability to be extended to add or modify functionality using addons.

In its current form, XenForo is largely a PHP app with some JS added for the occasional bit of UI nicety.

For the most part, there is very little required in the way of JS knowledge to be able to write addons.

If they changed to using a JavaScript front end framework, the complexity of development would go up in that you need to be proficient in two languages to extend the functionality.

I'm not saying it's a terrible idea, but it's a very significant change to the way the software works and I'm not sure it really fits with the intent of the software right now.

In either case, such a fundamental change in architecture would not really fit with a v2.x version - that's more like a v3.x (or later) change, so I'd suggest not likely to happen any time soon.

Given how long its taken to rebuild the architecture for v2.x, the main focus of the developers in the short to medium term is likely to be additional functionality and improving the functionality we already have.

Interestingly though, based on my (fairly limited) understanding of how these front end frameworks operate (typically calling back to a PHP backend API), the architecture they have built for v2.0 is likely to work quite well in that environment with relatively little structural change.