Using PleaseWait to actually show progress can be achieved by simply updating the loading HTML to show a number percentage, but we may update the API to make this easier in the future.
And I agree that a skeleton project to show proper modularization of different components would be great! Our blog just started an Angular series, so we'll try to write one on how we split up our large Angular enterprise app in this regard :)
But it's missing the point - just like other comments said - if you need this you're doing it wrong.
I sure was guilty of big sites just as much as the next guy. It just saddens me that insted of promoting what we've learned it the past years and applying to current projects we're doomed to repeat bad UX from before.
Maybe you're right, but I certainly think there are some valid cases where this could be useful. I'm not saying use it in every project, or use it as a workaround to a larger architectural issue, but if you have a single page app that does not render templates on the server, showing something like this while you make a few AJAX calls and compile the data returned into your client-side templates isn't the worse thing in the world. Slack and Asana do similar things, and I would hardly say that their engineering teams did a ton wrong. We actually built this because we're customers of both and enjoyed the screens they showed, so we wanted to see if we could make a generic library that others could use to do the same.
I for one think this is exactly the right attitude.
Sure. Maybe it's literally always a Bad Thing to show a loading screen. But plenty of apps have made that choice, for some reason or other. Maybe the developers are incompetent, or maybe they have a combination of technical and resource constraints that make this the best choice for them. It doesn't matter. At least this loading page can improve users' experiences with apps that have, for whatever reason, made the choice to go this route.
I agree with you on this. There's a large subset of the web development community who are shifting towards building desktop applications with web technology (atom-shell, node-webkit, brackets-shell, etc.). In a lot of these cases, the app bootstrap process is actually loading data/content that is required for proper app functionality. Desktop apps commonly use loading screens on boot to indicate this process (Photoshop is the example that comes to mind). I think this is a great tool, and will fit well with that subset of the web-dev community particularly well.
The point is: most of these applications (say, Photoshop, Gimp, Eclipse, OpenOffice, probably others) are things that you load once to work with them for a couple hours, and don't mind when they consume a lot of your system resources.
If you look at web applications, Google's music app ("My Music" in Google Play) uses a load screen (complete with progress bar) because it's seriously bloated, while Amazon's Cloudplayer just loads and does its thing (which is, playing music).
Needing a load screen is a sign that your app is not, or aims at not being, a Web app anymore - in the sense that you'd also want to loosen the other restrictions - give it its own window, possibly have local file storage or FS caching, etc.; In that case, something like TideSDK ( http://www.tidesdk.org/ ) may come in handy to deliver a desktop app to power users that is based on the same codebase. And, maybe you'd still want a web app that is functional and lean. (As an example for two apps with non-identical possibilities, Google's My Music allows you to change song metadata on desktop browsers but not in the Android app - yet another sign that My Music is meant as a desktop-y app).
In many cases it can be a sign of hubris or lazyness that you cannot get rid of the bloat. Be real and think whether your users actually enjoy waiting that time, since they'll be doing it more often, on machines with less resources and/or slower connection, than yours.
Asana's absurdly long load time was one of the main reasons I was glad to stop using it. It's definitely not something I would considered well implemented.
> by simply updating the loading HTML to show a number percentage
Note, this isn't always easy to do. If you use on-the-fly gzip compression (which is how most people set their nginx or whatever up), you won't get a Content-Length, so you can't show progress.
Ofc a blog describing your experience would be just that knowledge promoting that i have in mind so kudos for that (and i'll be keeping an eye for it because it is a hard problem to get right).
And I agree that a skeleton project to show proper modularization of different components would be great! Our blog just started an Angular series, so we'll try to write one on how we split up our large Angular enterprise app in this regard :)