mid-2000s I think it all started with the rise of AJAX and "Web 2.0". In the beginning it was just sort of gimmicky for visual effects and experience and we were all scratching the surface of what browsers could do.
2006-2009 server side frameworks were in vogue but most were slow and sometimes memory intensive. In the pursuit of creating highly interactive experiences that also scale many of us were optimizing website architectures around cached components of varying vintage and write frequency.
By 2009 we were solving for performance + scale + interactivity challenges using client side rendering for highly interactive components. During that period I can remember doing isomorphic rendering of mustache templates in server side Ruby and client side Javascript.
2010-ish Node was starting to gain traction and lots of attention went to Javascript. I think post-2010 many were pushing web app architectures to more client side business logic as web browsers became more and more capable. Backbone.js, SproutCore (now Ember.js), Knockout.js and others were on the scene by then and I think most other frameworks are inspired or derivative approaches meant to solve for their shortcomings.
2014-ish I think everyone was pushing responsive web. Apps got fatter and needed CDNs now more than ever. Websockets start to gain maturity. Cloud-services really start to gain traction beyond EC2 type deployments.
2015-2016 is the inflection point where client side frameworks start to get stupid complex, i.e. I can no longer read the source code of a web page easily, simple read only sites have a loading screen and/or need to download 1MB+ for reading a basic page.
2006-2009 server side frameworks were in vogue but most were slow and sometimes memory intensive. In the pursuit of creating highly interactive experiences that also scale many of us were optimizing website architectures around cached components of varying vintage and write frequency.
By 2009 we were solving for performance + scale + interactivity challenges using client side rendering for highly interactive components. During that period I can remember doing isomorphic rendering of mustache templates in server side Ruby and client side Javascript.
2010-ish Node was starting to gain traction and lots of attention went to Javascript. I think post-2010 many were pushing web app architectures to more client side business logic as web browsers became more and more capable. Backbone.js, SproutCore (now Ember.js), Knockout.js and others were on the scene by then and I think most other frameworks are inspired or derivative approaches meant to solve for their shortcomings.
2014-ish I think everyone was pushing responsive web. Apps got fatter and needed CDNs now more than ever. Websockets start to gain maturity. Cloud-services really start to gain traction beyond EC2 type deployments.
2015-2016 is the inflection point where client side frameworks start to get stupid complex, i.e. I can no longer read the source code of a web page easily, simple read only sites have a loading screen and/or need to download 1MB+ for reading a basic page.