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Comment by baldeagle | Hacker News Reader

I've been wondering over the last couple years what the state of the art is on server side rendering. There seems to be a lot of energy on the FE side with react and angular, but other than dockerization, I don't hear about the same class of big FAANG shiny backend rendering tools. Even the article is just pointing out that server side exists. I'm working on setting up a small website for my wife's business and am still thinking of running Flask/gUnicorn just like I did years ago. Maybe there is something with Elixer / Erlang, but that seems niche. What should I be looking at, if I want to skill up to the new shiny in server side rendering.

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I think it makes sense to just stick with what you know, unless you have good reasons not to. But since you asked (and mentioned Elixir), Phoenix live view or https://github.com/grych/drab.

Server-side rendering doesn't really have "new shiny". It works, just as it has, and that is a feature, not a bug.

This is why the next generation of dev's is going to be FE heavy, I think. Because the big marketing of mindshare and talks is going to all the developments on FE, vs server side where it is steady and reliable.

For React, AFAIK Next.js is the main guy for SSR

Next seems to do a lot right. But there are some big gaps that they need to fill to be the canonical SSR framework.

For example getInitialProps being isomorphic means there is no good way to define controller-like behaviour (redirects, error codes, data fetching). Their examples literally tell you to have the function check whether you're executing on the server or client and have the implement the desire to behaviour for both environments.

Their new APIs seems to be pushing people towards building functions for data loading that are deployed as standalone lambdas. This is not nearly as elegant as the solution they have for pages (any thing stored as "pages/:name.js" is renderable).

SSR React = Next.js

SSR Vue = Nuxt.js

Django is all SSR and is solid, if a little dated.

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