Do you really want a single-page application framework?
I&#x27;ve done exactly what this author advises - that is, build a complex, real-world single-page app using nothing but jQuery and some plugins.<p>I didn&#x27;t do this because I wanted to make some kind of point about architecture or overengineering. I did it because, at that time, front-end frameworks weren&#x27;t a thing, and the phrase &quot;single-page application&quot; hadn&#x27;t yet been invented. I didn&#x27;t even know that was what I was building, because it hadn&#x27;t been formalized as a concept. I just knew I had a problem to solve, a deadline to meet, and a contract to save.<p>Which I did. And it was <i>terrible</i>.<p>There&#x27;s a point to be made about overengineering. If your app takes five seconds to rebuild after a single-line change, maybe there&#x27;s a problem. But treating that as cause to throw the baby out with the bathwater amazes me in its foolishness. It makes exactly as much sense as saying that, because airplanes very occasionally fall out of the sky, they&#x27;re not worth having at all.<p>I&#x27;ve been seeing a lot of this weird nostalgia lately, this technological-romanticist attitude that there was a better time before web frameworks because everything was so much simpler then. Well, I was there, and it was not. The problems were just as complex; the only real difference was that the tooling sucked. Now it doesn&#x27;t. We no longer have to build complex applications from jQuery and bearskins. Speaking as one who has done so, that is not something to regret, and neither is a situation in which the major complaint we now have about our tools is that they do <i>too much</i>. As far as problems go, that&#x27;s a really nice one to have!