The page keeps mentioning 'isomorphic apps' but I have no idea what those are.
From googling, they appear to be JS code that can run client and server-side? Not what I would have guessed!
From googling, they appear to be JS code that can run client and server-side? Not what I would have guessed!
> being of identical or similar form, shape, or structure
I call it fronty-backy-samey-samey and everyone knows what I'm talking about.
To me the word makes me imagine a web application that can parse its own rendered HTML and get back the application state. Which sounds kind of interesting...
Isomorphic means that the same code can be used to "pre-render" an app on the server and to interactively run the app on the client, preferably without losing input state if the client-side execution is delayed (i.e. not throwing away the rendered content but attaching to it).
More generally it means that the code wraps any underlying APIs to make it behave similarly (but not necessarily identically) in node and the browser. Like isomorphic-fetch, which uses a polyfill (i.e. a fallback implementation in the absence of a native API) for the Fetch API in the browser or a node-based implementation in node.
The reason some people prefer the term isomorphic over universal is that isomorphic has no conflicting definition in the context of web apps. Universal on the other hand is extremely vague and ambiguous (ranging from "takes accessibility into account" to "works with different third party APIs" to "language independent").
The reason some people prefer the term universal over isomorphic is that isomorphic as a scientific term has unrelated meanings in mathematics, chemistry and other fields which can be domains for web apps.
Of course the real joke is that the definition is only about node and browsers, making no claim whatsoever about "all JS environments" or even "most". This is one of the reasons I personally don't like the term "universal": it implies a scope that simply isn't intended by most projects the term would be applied to. Something that only works in Edge and Node 5 might be "universal" but it isn't universal at all.
And the original use was in Philology[0]. Just because a word has two different meanings in two different contexts doesn't means it's wrong. I'm certainly glad the linguists didn't get up in arms when the mathematicians gave the 'wrong connotation' to isomorphism.
[0] - https://books.google.com/books?id=hZpeAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA711&lpg=...
By the way, for the broader point about language mutation, and prescriptivism vs descriptivism, I think there's a common stance against prescriptivism that also seems to rule out any negative opinion about language change—to which I say, hey, negative opinions are part of the whole mess too, even from a descriptivist standpoint. But this is a derail already; sorry.
SPAs are (relatively) slow to load. To improve perceived performance, the view requested is prerendered on the server with the ability to capture user input. The user sees a fully functioning site while the app bootstraps in the background.
Once the app is finished bootstrapping, the user inputs are replayed on the actual app.
This fixes the problem of poor perceived initial load times that come with SPAs. Once the app is bootstrapped everything is fast/snappy as one would expect with a SPA, incl no page refreshing between URIs.
Isomorphic React is already supported. Isomorphic Angular2 (ie Angular Universal) is in the works. I don't know about Ember but I'd assume they already support it.
…also known as 'universal apps' nowadays
(see https://medium.com/@mjackson/universal-javascript-4761051b7a...)