What is client-side routing and how is it used?

Question

I will be glad if someone could answer the following questions

1. How does it work?
2. Why is it necessary?
3. What does it improve?

Answer 1

Client side routing is the same as server side routing, but it's ran in the browser.

In a typical web application you have several pages which map into different URLs, and each of the pages has some logic and a template which is then rendered.

Client-side routing simply runs this process in the browser, using JavaScript for the logic and some JS based template engine or other such approaches to render the pages.

Typically it's used in single page applications, where the server-side code is primarily used to provide a RESTful API the client-side code uses via Ajax.

Answer 2

I was trying to build a Single page application and came to know about client side routing.

By implementing client side routing I was able to achieve the following

1. The front and back buttons in the browser started working for my single page JavaScript application. This was very important while accessing the page from a mobile browser.
2. The user was able to Bookmark/share a URL which was not possible earlier.