Hacker News Reader

the template rendering lives side by side with the controllers, why would it make an api call?

But something similar but not the same as that was the norm during the jquery era before the early js frameworks arised (backbone, ember et all). You had your full-stack server-side MVC framework render initial views and from there the js would pick up and all UI interactivity would be ajax calls to the restful(ish) api. It was pretty terrible.

View on HN

> why would it make an api call

Because this introduces clear separation of concerns? You don't need to make this API call via HTTP, you can just call a function. You don't even need to generate/parse JSON!

I know that because this is what we are doing. Just calling a function called "httpapp". :)

Well, but then it's not the same api call and that's the point: that in the old mvc frameworks it was painful having to support controllers that both rendered html and json for doing both SSR and Ajax.

Around the time the first js FE frameworks came out, people finally became confident enough to have pure js clients and only json APIs.

And finally gatsby, next.js, etc. brought a new twist to the SSR and Ajax api combo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com