It's been possible with React for quite some time[1], and it appears to be included in Angular 2[2].
[1]: https://github.com/mhart/react-server-example
[2]: https://angular.io
[1]: https://github.com/mhart/react-server-example
[2]: https://angular.io
There is a huge gulf between "synchronously render a component in Node" and "asynchronously boot an app, marshall async data, render an async UI, and do it concurrently."
I touch on this a little bit in this talk[1], but the bulk of the work we've done over the last year is conventionalizing app boot and figuring out how to run multiple instances concurrently, cheaply.
Angular 2 is much more similar to what we're doing with FastBoot, and I'm excited to see where they go with that and crosspollinate ideas. (The work they're doing with Web Worker rendering is also very exciting.)
I am a software engineer who usually develops also for the client side and I follow and experiment with the JS trends because I find them interesting. However, I don't understand what you mean by these. Could you please be more specific? Thank you.
It looks really cool... if I'm understanding it correctly, it can hot-load code in production, which is awesome and scary.
It appears to be a quickstart, so what is upgrading like?
It might be easier to get server-side rendering working with React, but pretending that it's not the same thing is just condescending. There are dozens of examples out there showing how to render React pages on the server, including fetching the necessary data for that rendering.
The mechanisms you use might be different, but pretending they're not analogous is duplicitous at best. Both let you ship a fully rendered first view to the client.
It is fundamentally different, as I outlined above. That's not downplaying the work of React—they've done significant work in advancing the state of the art of DOM rendering that has hugely inspired the work of both Glimmer and Glimmer 2, as we have said frequently and publicly.
I have tremendous respect for the Angular and React teams and consider many contributors to both to be personal friends. I'm not downplaying their work—it just really, really, really is not the same thing.
That said, everything you're describing – "asynchronously boot an app, marshall async data, render an async UI, and do it concurrently" – is really, really, really the same thing we're (my team at least) doing with React. People aren't just using `renderToString` and calling it a day.
Is there an 'analagous initiative' in React? No.
Can you end up with the same result in React? Yes.
There are people doing this in React, but each team needs to do it slightly differently because their app is setup differently. There are guides and examples on how to do it, but unless you setup your project exactly like the original author, you'll have to figure out portions of it on your own.
On top of that, you won't know if the modules that you are using will play well with the offline rendering.
The convention-driven approach IS the product... You make it sound like that is just a little bit of polish, maybe a page or two of documentation... But it took over a year of planning and architecture to make all of the changes. (There was a great demo of fastboot a year ago) Because of the planning and framework changes, however, every addon that follows the conventions will 'just work' with fastboot.
When Tom says "An App"... he means "Any App"... and that isn't something that I've seen being worked towards by the React community. It IS being done by other communities, as seen in this thread, so I think that it's valid for Tom to call this out as not being analogous.
The methods might very well be different, but the result is the same.
Pretending that you can't do server-side rendering with React is not helpful and untrue. Just because they haven't put the same work into conventionalizing it does not mean that analogous initiatives don't exist for React.
There are plenty of guides and tutorials out there showing how to do server side rendering in React.
You're right that tomdale came off condescending (as he often does when promoting/defending ember...ah well). But it certainly isn't "duplicitous at best"!
Analogous doesn't mean identical. The results are similar, even though what's happening under the hood is different.
> do it concurrently
Does ember renders concurrently?
> There is a huge gulf between "synchronously render a component in Node" and "asynchronously boot an app, marshall async data, render an async UI, and do it concurrently."
I dont think it is fair to say it that way. React implementation doing all this (except async/streaming rendering) is man-week at worst in existing medium sized project, and man-day for a new project with no pre-existing code.
The goal of those small examples is to illustrate that you don't need complex frameworks to achieve server-side rendering with data fetching and routing.
I have no doubt that FastBoot was a huge undertaking, and I think a large part of the reason for that is that it's aiming to fit into a very comprehensive existing framework, with pieces for routing, fetching data, "application instances", etc – there's a lot more work involved in that (for the framework author I mean, not the end user) than there is starting off with just a view library and adding your own pieces around that.