Ask HN: What happened to server-side rendering?

#1

Post by knasmai » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 4:15 PM UTC

A few years ago, there was a lot of talk about Isomorphic rendering of JavaScript, but seems to have died down recently.

Are any products still using it? What happened?

Re: Ask HN: What happened to server-side rendering?

#2

Post by heynk » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

At my team, we use next.js for pretty much every 'web-based' product.

https://github.com/zeit/next.js/

It gives you SSR with React out of the box. It's really nice to work with, and flexible enough that we haven't had issues with more customized situations.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to server-side rendering?

#3

Post by zamalek » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 6:42 PM UTC

While not JavaScript, there's now Razor Components[1]. It doesn't work exactly like isomorphic JS, as it operates more like a terminal session (the server sends down VDOM mutations to the client). I'm not entirely sold on the approach yet, but I am going to be keeping an eye on it.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/razor-component...

Re: Ask HN: What happened to server-side rendering?

#4

Post by xeromal » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 6:49 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #3

While not JavaScript, there's now Razor Components[1]. It doesn't work exactly like isomorphic JS, as it operates more like a terminal session (the server sends down VDOM mutations to the client). I'm not entirely sold on the approach yet, but I am going to be keeping an eye on it. [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/razor-component...

I played around with a Blazor POC not to long ago. It's something else to hit a breakpoint in Chrome in a DLL running on the mono runtime. It's wild tbh. I was able to leverage the trusty old C# Timer class to increment a counter every second and it ran just fine.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to server-side rendering?

#5

Post by sansnomme » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #3

While not JavaScript, there's now Razor Components[1]. It doesn't work exactly like isomorphic JS, as it operates more like a terminal session (the server sends down VDOM mutations to the client). I'm not entirely sold on the approach yet, but I am going to be keeping an eye on it. [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/razor-component...

I wonder what took so long for DOM-deltas-over-websockets tech to show up. It was only in the last two years or so for stuff like Plotly's Dash and Elixir Phoenix's LiveView to become popular even though we had Websockets and event driven networking for ages.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to server-side rendering?

#6

Post by mxstbr » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:36 PM UTC

Universal rendering is widely used in the React ecosystem, in large part thanks to Next.js[0] making it simple to set up and run.

Many large sites like Marvel.com, Nike.com, Invisionapp.com, hulu.com and many more run on server-side rendered React, see the Next.js showcase for a more complete list: https://nextjs.org/showcase

[0]: https://github.com/zeit/next.js/

Re: Ask HN: What happened to server-side rendering?

#7

Post by aboutruby » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:40 PM UTC

Most people have realized it's actually complicated to do it right and just gave up on server-rendering their React apps (e.g. Reddit).

Re: Ask HN: What happened to server-side rendering?

#8

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What happened to server-side rendering?

#9

Post by lr4444lr » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:58 PM UTC

My two cents:

1) Lack of reliable real time ability to detect device and compute size. 2) Increased computation complexity of what to render - why put that load on the server when devices are now commensurately as fast - or even faster given the trend to distributed services that maximize network throughput over power.

I'm not even sure why it was so popular in the first place; client server separation is a good thing, IMHO.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to server-side rendering?

#10

Post by zamalek » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:00 PM UTC

xeromal wrote: post #4

zamalek wrote: post #3

While not JavaScript, there's now Razor Components[1]. It doesn't work exactly like isomorphic JS, as it operates more like a terminal session (the server sends down VDOM mutations to the client). I'm not entirely sold on the approach yet, but I am going to be keeping an eye on it. [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/razor-component...

I played around with a Blazor POC not to long ago. It's something else to hit a breakpoint in Chrome in a DLL running on the mono runtime. It's wild tbh. I was able to leverage the trusty old C# Timer class to increment a counter every second and it ran just fine.

Razor Components are quite different to Blazor (although I think you can use the same code on both). If you weren't already aware of this difference it's worth taking another look.