A simple page application design assumes that good part of the website layout is fixed and there are a few placeholders for showing dynamic content. The layout and associated files can be download once, and the rest can be dynamically changed using AJAX calls to a backend Web API.

Limited connectivity is one of the main challenges in web mobile. The stateless nature of http causes that content and associated static files like scripts or images be transmitted over the wire every time a page is fully refreshed (assuming http caching is not implemented correctly). Diverse techniques have emerged over the years to solve part of that problem by using the browser AJAX support. One of these techniques, which drastically changed the way we develop web applications is know as simple page applications.

A simple page application design assumes that good part of the website layout is fixed and there are a few placeholders for showing dynamic content. The layout and associated files can be download once, and the rest can be dynamically changed using AJAX calls to a backend Web API.

There are also a few improvements that can be made like caching all the static content and associated files, and use client templates to remove all the overhead involved with downloading html markup on every AJAX call. By using client templates (e.g. JQuery templates, JSRender, Mustache) , only the data (usually JSON data) is negotiated with the backend, and the templates can be cached as static content as well.

In the area of web mobile, it is pretty important to optimize the use of the available bandwidth to support scenarios where the connectivity is very unreliable or limited data plans are used. This is exactly where simple page applications make a lot of sense. As this kind of application makes a heavy use of javascript for DOM manipulation, it might not be ideal for all kind of mobile devices (the device should support DOM manipulation and XHR).

I personally think this kind of architecture for a web application will become a common norm now that we have devices with web support everywhere.