If you're working with data you often end up a wanting dashboard- style view - a single page of independent but related widgets (tables, charts, etc) which facilitates an at-a-glace summary of the dataset you're working with.
The difficulty here is that the web was designed as a document rendering system, whereas a dashboard requires something more akin to a component management system. And this bias is built into most common webservers, which require you to set up templates for each view and then inject variables into those templates. Which is fine if you only have one table per page, but things quickly becomes unmanageable if you're trying to manage multiple components - you find yourself replicating template markup all over the place and hacking together custom JS code to manage each component's state.
Worse still, an individual component can't update itself in isolation - the only option is to re- render the entire page, with all the performance implications that entails; you can forget about real time updates for a start.
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