We've Open-sourced Rendr • Hacker News Board

Re: We've Open-sourced Rendr

#21

Post by pbiggar » Fri, Apr 19, 2013, 5:27 PM UTC

frontendbeauty wrote: post #15

pbiggar wrote: post #10

I'm not sure I fully understand this, is this just for SEO? Why not run the page in phantomJS, which is what we do at https://circleci.com , and what meteor apps do, and any others?

SEO was our first concern, but then we realized performance was the big win. Serving the user a full page of HTML rather than waiting for JS to download before rendering HTML makes a big difference, especially on high-latency or low-bandwidth connections (mobile). EDIT: We decided against using something like PhantomJS or node-chimera because why deal with a DOM if you don't have to? DOM is complicated and slow, comp…

Cool stuff, thanks for the response!

Re: We've Open-sourced Rendr

#22

Post by d0m » Fri, Apr 19, 2013, 5:33 PM UTC

Just wondering what's the difference between this post and the last one where Rendr was already open-sourced? I mean, it was already open sourced for a while. Is there a change log or an adapter to better integrate with other systems? Thanks!

Re: We've Open-sourced Rendr

#23

Post by fuddle » Fri, Apr 19, 2013, 5:37 PM UTC

frontendbeauty wrote: post #14

apendleton wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't work there, but I doubt it. With rendr, both the client- and server-side portions of the Backbone stack still need to consume an upstream API. If I had to guess, I'd say that for projects they're building that use this stack, all the templating/rendering/presentation logic is in JS, but that the database interaction stuff probably isn't; they probably have Rails apps that expose a RESTful API that the rendr a…

This is exactly right. We still have 5 years worth of business logic in Rails, so we just expose a RESTful API as part of the Rails app. The same API is consumed by our iOS, Android, Mobile Web, and Desktop clients.

Cool stuff, very interesting concept, would love to see an example working with a Rails RESTful API.

Re: We've Open-sourced Rendr

#24

Post by jjsz » Fri, Apr 19, 2013, 5:42 PM UTC

csmatt wrote: post #9

don_draper wrote: post #7

Are there any similar efforts to tie the server with the client, reducing duplication, for Angular?

The first thing I thought of that is similar to Rendr is http://meteor.com/ . I'm not sure about how it works with Angular. It does describe itself as a framework where Rendr describes itself as a library, so I'd think it'd be easier to run Angular stuff on top of Rendr.

There's also hoodie + yeoman, but there aren't any adapters for angular yet. For some reason angular doesn't get official love from libraries like rendr and meteor.

Re: We've Open-sourced Rendr

#25

Post by frontendbeauty » Fri, Apr 19, 2013, 5:44 PM UTC

fuddle wrote: post #23

frontendbeauty wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right. We still have 5 years worth of business logic in Rails, so we just expose a RESTful API as part of the Rails app. The same API is consumed by our iOS, Android, Mobile Web, and Desktop clients.

Cool stuff, very interesting concept, would love to see an example working with a Rails RESTful API.

The app template is such an example, consuming the public GitHub API: https://github.com/airbnb/rendr-app-template

In the future, we'd like to come up with some more in-depth tutorials.

Re: We've Open-sourced Rendr

#26

Post by adamnemecek » Fri, Apr 19, 2013, 5:46 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #8

so they have completely ditch Rails and Ruby?

IIRC, they are using node.js and rendr for their mobile site and still use Rails for the main website.

Re: We've Open-sourced Rendr

#27

Post by fuddle » Fri, Apr 19, 2013, 6:01 PM UTC

frontendbeauty wrote: post #25

fuddle wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool stuff, very interesting concept, would love to see an example working with a Rails RESTful API.

The app template is such an example, consuming the public GitHub API: https://github.com/airbnb/rendr-app-template In the future, we'd like to come up with some more in-depth tutorials.

Great thanks I'll take a look at it again, I seen the "Interacting with a RESTful API" section in the wiki left blank and assumed it was in the pipeline.

Re: We've Open-sourced Rendr

#28

Post by dualogy » Fri, Apr 19, 2013, 6:01 PM UTC

csulmone wrote: post #12

Wow, looks very impressive from my quick look over it. These days, there are so many JavaScript frameworks for web development, it's starting to make my head spin a little bit. Does anyone have a link to a good rundown of where everyone stands?

> Does anyone have a link to a good rundown of where everyone stands?

Well, even if I had one, it would be outdated in 2 weeks..

Re: We've Open-sourced Rendr

#29

Post by untog » Fri, Apr 19, 2013, 6:02 PM UTC

wsc981 wrote: post #5

Posts like this makes me think Airbnb is a awesome place to work. Sharing is caring!

It's great to see AirBnb's open sourced work, and tech talks, etc. Kudos to them - I'm sure it helps a lot with recruiting. I used to work for a company in a similar space and looked to AirBnb with deep envy.

Re: We've Open-sourced Rendr

#30

Post by avodonosov » Fri, Apr 19, 2013, 6:14 PM UTC

d0m wrote: post #22

Just wondering what's the difference between this post and the last one where Rendr was already open-sourced? I mean, it was already open sourced for a while. Is there a change log or an adapter to better integrate with other systems? Thanks!

The big change is that I missed the previous post, but noticed this one :)