Resumability—A New Primitive for Developing Web Applications

World Wide Web was originally meant as a global information exchange but it has since then morphed into the largest available application platform. Especially during the past decade, mobile usage has been rising while the size of websites and applications has been steadily rising therefore making size an important target for optimization. In this article, we look into a new primitive called resumability. Resumability allows developers to avoid caveats of earlier approaches, such as hydration, by embedding some of the required data straight into HTML markup delivered to the client. Then the client resumes execution as an application becomes interactive. The technique allows frameworks to apply well-known techniques, such as code-splitting, automatically therefore reducing developer effort. By considering past developments and a couple of concrete examples, we propose resumability as a new primitive for web application development. Furthermore, we also discuss potential research directions for those wanting to understand the topic in greater detail.