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Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

site44.com

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Re: Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

#72

How do you make a website that is 100% client side? Where is the SQL, PHP? I am not sure I know who this for...

Imagine taking what a user sees in their browser when they view-source and giving them that.

Let's take a blog, for instance. What you effectively do is pre-render all your blog posts into ready-to-be-served HTML. When you visit a Wordpress site, PHP takes over and custom builds the response for the request. EVERY request that isn't being cached effectively.

Now there are tradeoffs. You won't be able to have some user/visitor specific data like user profile. You have to get crafty with what else you take for granted that is exposed through server-side languages and database persistence. You have to push functionality out to the front-end if you wish to have a rich content site.

What are the benefits? Substantially less server load as this is just serving static assets (HTML, JS, CSS, images). Lessened security concerns ( absence of SQL injection, Cross-site scripting attack vector from untrusted user content is removed). Highly cacheable content. Less 'moving parts' to worry about which could break in production.

Your site can still be managed by PHP, Ruby, Python, etc and have a database backing it, but it is not accessible from the Internet by visitors. A static site solves a defined set of problems, but it is definitely not a hammer.

Re: Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

#73
post #58
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

www.site44.com itself is hosted on Site44. My blog is too ( http://blog.smarx.com ). Be careful when testing performance... browser refreshes trigger us going back to Dropbox to look for changes to files, so they're considerably slower than just navigating around a site (where we typically serve pages from an in-memory cache). EDIT: Forgot to mention I'm one of the founders of Planet Rational (the company that made t…

Are you using the /delta API? https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/15

Yes. See our guest post on that same blog: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/23

Re: Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

#74
post #43

Any examples anyone can show? I'd be interested to see how these pages perform.

www.site44.com itself is hosted on Site44. My blog is too ( http://blog.smarx.com ). Be careful when testing performance... browser refreshes trigger us going back to Dropbox to look for changes to files, so they're considerably slower than just navigating around a site (where we typically serve pages from an in-memory cache). EDIT: Forgot to mention I'm one of the founders of Planet Rational (the company that made t…

Would that mean that a user on one of these sites could negatively impact the performance of the site by just refreshing it a bunch?

Re: Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

#75
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

www.site44.com itself is hosted on Site44. My blog is too ( http://blog.smarx.com ). Be careful when testing performance... browser refreshes trigger us going back to Dropbox to look for changes to files, so they're considerably slower than just navigating around a site (where we typically serve pages from an in-memory cache). EDIT: Forgot to mention I'm one of the founders of Planet Rational (the company that made t…

Would that mean that a user on one of these sites could negatively impact the performance of the site by just refreshing it a bunch?

No, not really. Only the person pressing refresh would get slower responses, and we do limit the number of calls we'll make to Dropbox for a given site.

I may not have explained properly. What happens is that when we get a request that looks like a refresh, we ask Dropbox for updates before we fulfill the request. So it's only that specific request that is slowed down.

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