I was lucky to be able to catch a preview presentation of this "Holy Grail" project at SpainJS, last summer. It's very interesting stuff. I think that one of the more important caveats to mention is that to the extent that your application is composed of rich interactions, visualizations and interactivity, and logged-in-user-only content, that stuff tends to remain on the client-side alone ... but for your basic rendering of JavaScript models to a flat HTML page, this is a great project to keep a close watch on. In particular:
* Caching of shared static HTML for fast-as-possible page loads.
* Google indexing and searchability.
* Backbone apps that feel more like a series of pages and less like a single-page app.
... are all things that are addressed quite neatly by Rendr.
Jeremy, I think you're mistaking this for Keith Norman's SpainJS presentation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbn9c_yfuoM). He proposes the same approach, but I don't know if it ever got past a demo. Although it seems like they may be using some form of this at Groupon in production.
Anyway, it is exciting, isn't it? This is just the beginning for us -- we've had to make a few hacky design decisions to be able to ship, but I think we will get the kinks worked out. The trick, and the challenge, seems to lie in choosing the right set of abstractions to hide the code complexity from the application developer. I hope to open source it as soon as I can, to benefit from the input of luminaries such as yourself!
Oh yeah, and the offer to give a Tech Talk at Airbnb next time you're in SF still stands :)
Jashkenas, do you have any plans to venture into this area?
I was just talking today about how I am tempted to try some of the other libraries that are going this direction. But that whenever I look at their code I'm envious of how clean Backbone is. Seriously the biggest turn-off to Angular is reading the code and seeing that people aren't as nit-picky, pseudo-OCD, whatever you want to call it as you are. Just curious.
The cool part is that Rendr builds a backbone hierarchy around server generated HTML, attaching the rich interactions after the page has been displayed. Although, if the user starts to interact before that view hierarchy has been constructed, for example by clicking on links, the behavior won't be "rich". (However that would require some fast clicking!)
This is exactly what I've been waiting for. I can't wait til this is open-sourced! Was just thinking about trying out Angular because Backbone just wasn't cutting it, but this is going to make me hold out.
Random piece of feedback: it's weird to use data-model_id (instead of data-model-id). I assume you're trying to match some pre-existing naming convention (but JS tends towards camelCase anyways...), but I think it would be better to go with dashes as that is HTML attribute standard. That was the only part that looked sloppy to me.
Another thought: Did you guys experiment with event-based logic for postRender instead of pre-defined method hooks? I find the pre-defined method approach hacky feeling.
DerbyJS is a pretty cool project. I was checking it out a while ago but there was no way to hide private data (user details etc) from the client. It seems they have made a start on that now though[0]. Might be time to take another look.
This is really interesting, although I'm still new enough to node and complex JS apps that I'm struggling to take it all in. That being said, could a hack-ish approximation of what Airbnb is doing be accomplished by rendering the first call of an app in phantom.js and pushing it out in the response stream?
Questions about session state management are popping up in my head but maybe that's some of the secret sauce in the Rendr portion of Airbnb's app.
Great work guys, this is really pushing the boundaries of full stack app development with js.
Author here (spikebrehm). Good question. Yep, you could accomplish something similar by booting up PhantomJS or node-chimera [0] and scraping yourself, but that seems hacky and hard to scale. Justin Tulloss of Rdio talked about this approach in his Airbnb Tech Talk [1], saying that the tricky part is determining when the page is actually done rendering, especially if you have a bunch of JavaScript that's performing DOM manipulation.
Fantastic. This kind of thing, and Meteor, is really what Node is made for. Till recently, Node web frameworks mostly been "let's do RoR or Sinatra, but look it's in JS! #Neat". Sure, there's some benefit in terms of developer skill set and avoiding schizophrenic context-switching; but still, the great promise of SSJS is running the same actual code on both sides.
To be honest, Meteor is nice and a very ambitious project but the fact that you are writing an application with it means you are probably wedded to it.
That's why I've been using Express for my middleware, npm modules as needed, and mongoose as my db wrapper (or if I want to switch it out for redis, I can do so easily). Not sure how easily I can port my "meteor app" to a different framework that comes along.
That's not the holy grail. I'll tell you what the holy grail is:
A web app that runs completely on CSS.
No need for stupid web servers, but since web servers are handy we'll build one with css.
And I scoff at HTML; but because of performance I made css compile to html too.
I'm working on a project that'll I'll be unveiling as my 'open source master piece'; It's just a little thing I call node.css. That's right, css bindings to C++. No more stupid C++ either.
Strap on some CSS build automation and what do you get? That's right, the holy grail. I'll call it CSS on Rails.
What's more, I've already done it and launched my current employers flagship product on it. Hope it doesn't screw the entire business over the long haul. Oh well, I can switch jobs if that happens and pretend I never posted this.
I'd much, much rather move Django to the client than JS to the server. With CoffeeScript, this would be more tolerable, but even sacrificing Python, I love Django's architecture so much I don't want to give it up.
I'm utterly confused. The main benefit of this approach is summed up in the paragraph:
"Compare this with serving the full search results HTML from the server.... It feels 5x faster."
But doesn't ruby on rails (and most other web stacks) already do server side rendering VERY well and are hugely supported by enormous communities. Javascript is useful for things like infinite scroll, interactive client side calendars or making browser based games; but a web search is absolutely simple in ROR and doesn't need backbone or javascript at all.
Don't get me wrong, I love javascript and backbone / angular. But why push logic to the client side for a search page and then try to pull client-side technologies back to the server side in an effort to resolve performance problems that are already solved by existing technology?
In the words of Carl Sagan "why not skip a step". Unless you just love javascript so much that you're willing to recreate rails on the server side with it. That would be a sensible reason to do it.
Not trying to troll, just thought I'd throw this perspective out there.
Not to mention SEO. The points outlined above in the top comment (* Caching of shared static HTML for fast-as-possible page loads. * Google indexing and searchability.* Backbone apps that feel more like a series of pages and less like a single-page app.) are all things that Rendr accomplishes that are already taken care of by not making a full blown client-side JS app.
I think us developers are running into the same issues or pitfalls that we ran into during the rise of flash, where we move everything to the client because we can. The problems that Rendr is solving seems to be the same problems caused by giving too much responsibility to JS.
You're missing the part about how single-page, client-side apps are much more performant _once_ the page loads. Spike is trying to get the best of both worlds (hence "Holy Grail").
Server-side gives you fast page load times.
Client-side gives you fast user interaction times.
This sort of integration has been happening more and more with the data format as well for me. After around the third mobile client for a server I'm tired of native data models and just want the closest thing to the server's (and the DB's in the case on Mongo) JSON. I don't need it repeated in SQL DML, JSON, Java, Objective-C, C#...
Great article, especially in coming up with a clean way to reaching the holy grail. I remember seeing in Spike's tech talk some months back that they initially chose DerbyJS, but it seems from the blog post that they went with Express instead. Curious to find out why.
Really hoping EmberJS gets this feature as well. It's possible now (with some fancy hacks), but I've read they plan to bake it into the framework (along with tight rails integration). Basically it just comes down to generating the initial view HTML on the server (by running the initial api call and render), then subsequent calls would be handled by the client.
Doesn't have to be 100% Node.js front to back (you can still write your APIs in another language), but Node provides that handy bridge to get the server side rendering of client code.
I was just thinking about this today. The web devs I'm working with are talking about ditching Rails entirely in favor of in-browser template rendering by JS. With a backend also in JS, it seems to clearly be a winning development environment for new projects today. Just the diminished learning curve would be enough for me to look closely at this. This is coming from a very non-front end guy, though, so I might be a little starry-eyed.
Hey guys, looks pretty good.
I'm interested in the decision to move to server side templating. You mention that the loading of js, then making an ajax call, then rendering the page, was slower than just serving up html.
Did you guys try bootstrapping json data server side? That way you could avoid making an ajax request on load.
Do you have any perf numbers to share?
Author here. So, yes, bootstrapping the JSON on initial pageload would be a lot faster than waiting for the Backbone.Router to fetch it (for the Rails + Backbone approach). But therein lies the problem I was talking about: to bootstrap the data for a particular URL, but to also have the client-side request the proper data for that URL in response to a pushState event, you end up needing to duplicate the mappings from app URLs to API resources on the client- and server-sides, and you need to be able to access the same API on both sides as well.
We avoid this with Rendr by defining routes, controllers, models, etc in a way that can be run on both sides.
I've been looking for resources on when to use rails vs when to use node.js. I've been programming in ruby/rails for 2 years and picked up node about 9 months ago. Any tips or resources to learn which tool to use depending on the problem?
I'd think the use case being addressed in the article (having to share backbone views that can be rendered either on the client or server) would be the sweet spot for node.
I'd just like to note that those working on Backbone single-page apps hosted by an ASP.NET site can also achieve this idiomatically, with the use of the Nustache view engine and controller actions that can do HTTP content negotiation.
[+] [-] jashkenas|13 years ago|reply
* Caching of shared static HTML for fast-as-possible page loads.
* Google indexing and searchability.
* Backbone apps that feel more like a series of pages and less like a single-page app.
... are all things that are addressed quite neatly by Rendr.
[+] [-] frontendbeauty|13 years ago|reply
Jeremy, I think you're mistaking this for Keith Norman's SpainJS presentation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbn9c_yfuoM). He proposes the same approach, but I don't know if it ever got past a demo. Although it seems like they may be using some form of this at Groupon in production.
Anyway, it is exciting, isn't it? This is just the beginning for us -- we've had to make a few hacky design decisions to be able to ship, but I think we will get the kinks worked out. The trick, and the challenge, seems to lie in choosing the right set of abstractions to hide the code complexity from the application developer. I hope to open source it as soon as I can, to benefit from the input of luminaries such as yourself!
Oh yeah, and the offer to give a Tech Talk at Airbnb next time you're in SF still stands :)
[+] [-] ianstormtaylor|13 years ago|reply
I was just talking today about how I am tempted to try some of the other libraries that are going this direction. But that whenever I look at their code I'm envious of how clean Backbone is. Seriously the biggest turn-off to Angular is reading the code and seeing that people aren't as nit-picky, pseudo-OCD, whatever you want to call it as you are. Just curious.
[+] [-] colevscode|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianstormtaylor|13 years ago|reply
Random piece of feedback: it's weird to use data-model_id (instead of data-model-id). I assume you're trying to match some pre-existing naming convention (but JS tends towards camelCase anyways...), but I think it would be better to go with dashes as that is HTML attribute standard. That was the only part that looked sloppy to me.
Another thought: Did you guys experiment with event-based logic for postRender instead of pre-defined method hooks? I find the pre-defined method approach hacky feeling.
[+] [-] ludwigvan|13 years ago|reply
I have thought about this one too in my own applications, and I seem to switch back and forth.
The good thing about using underscore is that the variable name can match on both sides of the expression:
vs Mixing camelCase with dash seems a bit weird for me, because now there is a delimiter delimited, and case delimited convention: `data-modelId`.I am trying to use camelCase for new code in other parts of the code though, as it seems to be the general convention in JS. [0]
[0] http://ozmm.org/posts/javascript_style.html
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] switz|13 years ago|reply
For an example, visit http://phishvids.com – try clicking around and then refreshing or even disabling javascript.
[0] http://derbyjs.com
[+] [-] adam-a|13 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/codeparty/racer/blob/master/lib/accessCon...
[+] [-] bherms|13 years ago|reply
I'd love to help with the transition to Redis if I get some free time in the near future, assuming you're still looking to go that route.
[+] [-] spyder|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbigelow76|13 years ago|reply
Questions about session state management are popping up in my head but maybe that's some of the secret sauce in the Rendr portion of Airbnb's app.
Great work guys, this is really pushing the boundaries of full stack app development with js.
[+] [-] frontendbeauty|13 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/deanmao/node-chimera [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB-l2nF67iU
[+] [-] mmahemoff|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fourstar|13 years ago|reply
That's why I've been using Express for my middleware, npm modules as needed, and mongoose as my db wrapper (or if I want to switch it out for redis, I can do so easily). Not sure how easily I can port my "meteor app" to a different framework that comes along.
[+] [-] fukyeah|13 years ago|reply
A web app that runs completely on CSS.
No need for stupid web servers, but since web servers are handy we'll build one with css.
And I scoff at HTML; but because of performance I made css compile to html too.
I'm working on a project that'll I'll be unveiling as my 'open source master piece'; It's just a little thing I call node.css. That's right, css bindings to C++. No more stupid C++ either.
Strap on some CSS build automation and what do you get? That's right, the holy grail. I'll call it CSS on Rails.
What's more, I've already done it and launched my current employers flagship product on it. Hope it doesn't screw the entire business over the long haul. Oh well, I can switch jobs if that happens and pretend I never posted this.
[+] [-] phatbyte|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acjohnson55|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dnajd|13 years ago|reply
But doesn't ruby on rails (and most other web stacks) already do server side rendering VERY well and are hugely supported by enormous communities. Javascript is useful for things like infinite scroll, interactive client side calendars or making browser based games; but a web search is absolutely simple in ROR and doesn't need backbone or javascript at all.
Don't get me wrong, I love javascript and backbone / angular. But why push logic to the client side for a search page and then try to pull client-side technologies back to the server side in an effort to resolve performance problems that are already solved by existing technology?
In the words of Carl Sagan "why not skip a step". Unless you just love javascript so much that you're willing to recreate rails on the server side with it. That would be a sensible reason to do it.
Not trying to troll, just thought I'd throw this perspective out there.
[+] [-] efnx|13 years ago|reply
I think us developers are running into the same issues or pitfalls that we ran into during the rise of flash, where we move everything to the client because we can. The problems that Rendr is solving seems to be the same problems caused by giving too much responsibility to JS.
[+] [-] ianstormtaylor|13 years ago|reply
Server-side gives you fast page load times. Client-side gives you fast user interaction times.
[+] [-] lnanek2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minikomi|13 years ago|reply
That said, very interesting article.
I wonder.. Has anyone tried rendering a page, and then bootstraping your initial Backbone models pulling data from the HTML?
[+] [-] 2mur|13 years ago|reply
http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2011/09/26/seo-and-access...
[+] [-] AirbnbNerds|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulbjensen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masiello|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesc|13 years ago|reply
Doesn't have to be 100% Node.js front to back (you can still write your APIs in another language), but Node provides that handy bridge to get the server side rendering of client code.
[+] [-] l1ghtm4n|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enoughalready|13 years ago|reply
Thanks!
[+] [-] frontendbeauty|13 years ago|reply
We avoid this with Rendr by defining routes, controllers, models, etc in a way that can be run on both sides.
[+] [-] jared314|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.liveside.net/2007/12/05/microsoft-releases-volta-...
[+] [-] new2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modarts|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcgwiz|13 years ago|reply
I'd just like to note that those working on Backbone single-page apps hosted by an ASP.NET site can also achieve this idiomatically, with the use of the Nustache view engine and controller actions that can do HTTP content negotiation.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]