Moving to client side, jQuery on ASP.NET

Question

I'm building some simple web apps and using jQuery to call .net webmethods.

The more I put together, the more I wonder where I draw the line between the aspx page and what I can produce with jQuery/jTemplate and a few ajax calls. It seems I can do everything on the client now, and easily too. At the moment I've just got one default.htm that does everything.

So, it would be great to know what problems you think I'll come across if I continue with this choice of architecture. What are the strengths of server-generated pages? Should I go all out client or all out server? It seems mixing the two might be worse of both worlds.

Answer 1

Some concerns with your approach so far:

• If your user turns off JavaScript, they can't use the site.
• Your user will have a hard-time bookmarking things.
• You risk putting too much code in one place, making it very hard to maintain
• Controlling security could be more difficult and complicated

Answer 2

Be careful doing JS only pages, as Google Bots tend to not see content generated by AJAX. I have always done a good mix, where the page has a great amount of content the Search Engines can digest wile using the JS/Ajaxy stuff to wow the humans...