What is Server Side Rendering (SSR) ?
That's often a tricky question for a lot of people, where answers range from "it's good for static website...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Hi @christopherkade , thanks for sharing your thoughts. I never put in the effort to play with SSR libs/frameworks until this morning after reading this post so thank you for that as well! I do have some questions about the drawbacks you mentioned concerning SSR.
Can this just be mitigated and no longer a concern if your "server", aka your
Next.jsapp, was only handling the frontend: rendering and routing, while your actual server, let's just go withExpress.js, handles your data: REST, CRUD operations, user auth, etc.? Of course, in this scenario both ends would be hosted on different machines.This one is a little confusing for me to understand. Is this suggesting that we can't use a fetch request to send or receive data and just replace the DOM content?
Hi Brandon, I'm really glad the article pushed you to start working with SSR !
If I understood your first question correctly, you'd have an Express server that handles usual operations while having a client built using Next and server-rendered.
Either way, your individual pages would be queried to the server at each route. Doing REST, CRUD and authentication operations by querying your server is one thing, but getting the HTML on each route is another.
For your second question, I understand the confusion, so let me clarify:
Imagine you have an e-mail under
/inbox/42where 42 is the e-mail's ID. Theindex.htmlpage related to this specific e-mail would need to be already rendered on the server in order for it to be SSR. This way, when you reach this page, the complete page (and therefore its content) would be received by the client.In an SPA case, the data for the e-mail with an ID of 42 would be queried to the server as you'd normally do.
I really hope this helps, and thank you for your feedback !
Gotcha, definitely cleared up what I was thinking, thank you.
So I guess another question is what is technically SSR? You touch on it a bit in this post but with everything getting data from a RESTful endpoint this would typically mean even a simple blog grabbing a posts' content from a database wouldn't be considered SSR correct?
For example, if using
NextandReact, when requesting a blog post I would have afetchrequest inside of thecomponentDidMount()method which is only called after the initialrender()method. The way you've explained the Gmail scenario makes me think that this is no longer considered SSR even if usingNextto render the page, correct? Another thought is that perhaps all of this is done on the server side, going through all of theReact Component LifeCycle Methodsbefore actually sending the HTML to the client which if that's the case then that would be considered SSR.Is there a way to have a SSR SPA hybrid? So on the first request, it acquires a server rendered page and then all clicks after that work with a SPA which makes RESTful calls?
Nuxt and Next already do this. You only reach the server on the first request and then everything else works like a spa
Same with Gatsby.
If you want to go futher, checkout LiveView, it returns complete layout in html/css on the initial get request, then use websocket to push user interaction to the server.
The server maintain the virtual dom, and send the diff patch to the client for partial update.
This way the client don't need to download heavy javascript bundles. It has two implementations so far, in typescript and elixir
I enjoyed reading your article, but I've got to pick some bones:
You wouldn't do server side rendering for static sites - you wouldn't need to render at all. Just serve up the static html file.
Time to 'load' is shorter for SPAs - but usually that's the time to load the spinner that tells you the rest of your page is loading...
Gmail does still use server side rendering. Try turning off JavaScript (don't panic) in your browser and enjoy your Gmail like it's 2005 again. You'll be surprised how clean it looks and how fast it loads on even the slowest connection or oldest computer. You'll also be surprised that you can still do almost everything you need. Try it now!
What's depressed me about this piece is that it seems that there's a whole generation of (front end) developers who don't realise you can build a web application without building a single-page app.
Glad you mentioned Gmail, I definitely did not know that. Thanks for sharing.
Depressed does seem like a rather big word for such an assumption. Tools and methods evolve, and the fact that people document themselves here should be inspiring, not depressing.
Either way, thank you for sharing some info
Sorry, yes - in no way do I wish to take away from what you've written. It's well written and a good read! I'm sorry if 'depressed' threw a little shade your way, please don't take it to heart - I'm just being a grognard.
It's absolutely fine, I'm glad you shared your experience
There is quite a lot that I want to disagree with here...
Server side rendering does not mean more network requests. If anything it means less requests.
Server side rendering can be done through various means. It's one of the fundamentals of the web.
There are issues with how it's often done, though...
In many cases, we wait for a
DOMContentLoaded/loadevent listener (jQuery.readyhook) or throw our application at the end of the page. This sort of thing does not lend itself well to pages needing interaction.An example might be using a
clickglobal event listener and filtering by class (or closest) to work it.I see the idea of server-side rendering as counter-intuitive in most applications. Service workers might make more sense if you think of them as the go-between for a client and a server.
For instance, Jake Archibald is basically the guy who napkined service workers, and uses them... for everything.
SSR is almost always faster than client rendered to have working content, given that you aren't killing the thread.
Serviceworker rendered... is similar. It's midway.
If you're building for it, it's more or less one of three. You attach global listeners and wait until you have some confirmation. I've done it myself, though on a really small scale.
It's everything that you do that makes it work. It may not necessarily work well, but it works.
Great article.I think it should be a good practice use SSR in angular projects. Never actually tried that.
Great article.
In the past, i was a fan of SPA and i'd wanted using it for any project. But after that i understood you need to use the tool according to the project needs.
Btw, from time ago i've thought to create my personal blog site with Gatsby, have you used it?.
Thank you !
My own blog is made using Gatsby so I'd definitely recommend it
Some of the information in this article is misleading (at least how I understand the wording). For example,
Actually they use SSR to improve first paint. It depends on the setup of course, but generally it takes more time to download JS and render the page than download HTML and CSS. As soon as page is loaded it would be faster (typically) to change it with JS instead of navigating with the browser.
There is a good article on the subject: developers.google.com/web/updates/...
I developed a tool having in mind Server Side Rendering, and it evolved in something more complex :) I'd like to hear your feedback on the tool. Here is the doc page for SSR. It figures out the webpack for server by itself, removes the need to setup a node/express server and has built-in autoscaling :)
Nice article, please also check my series around advanced concepts with Angular Universal :)
dev.to/angular/better-sharing-on-s...
Thank you !
more for resource vuejs: gridsome, vuepress
Thanks for this explanation. What do you think of something that is a combo of both like a PHP page that returns a json that JavaScript is used to render that file?