Benefits of ROCA

ROCA has a number of advantages:

Clean architecture #

The applications have a clean architecture. The logic is on the server. Changes to the logic can easily be rolled out by a new server version.

Web features can be harnessed #

All features of the web can also be used.

• URLs can be sent to other people (for example, by email) because they uniquely identify resources.

• HTTP caches can be used if, say HTTP GETs are not allowed to change data.

• Optimizations in the browsers are exploited. Browsers implement many tricks to show users the first parts of a website and to allow interactions as quickly as possible.

Low bandwidth consumption #

Applications get by with little bandwidth as a result of usually having to transfer no more than HTML – and only for the web pages that are actually visited.

In an SPA, on the other hand, often the entire application must be transferred before any interaction is possible at all.

Modern SPA technologies optimize this by loading separate modules rather than all the code. However, initializing the application and making it react to user interaction still takes some time. This is easier with a simple web application.

Modern browsers are optimized to make user interaction with simple web applications as fast and responsive as possible.

High speed #

The solution is fast, especially for mobile devices; the speed of JavaScript implementations often leaves much to be desired. ROCA applications require a minimum of JavaScript.

Resilience #

Finally, an error in JavaScript or in the transfer of the JavaScript code due to a problem on the network only leads to hard-to-use, though still available applications. If logic were implemented in JavaScript, this would not be the case and the application would have less resilience.

JavaScript not necessary #

Users with JavaScript switched off can still use the application. Nowadays, these users are practically non-existent so this advantage is irrelevant.