Hacker News Reader

Comment by etchalon | Hacker News Reader

I'm convinced SSR is only a thing because of Lighthouse scores.

Client-side rendering with client-agnostic REST APIs is a fantastic architecture.

But noooooooooo we can't have nice things

It's a nice architecture when the API devs get to throw stuff over the fence to the frontend devs. It's less nice when you are the guy throwing stuff over the fence and then running around the fence to catch the stuff you just threw over it. It makes you start to wonder if there's anything you can do about the fence.

The answer is "yes."

What an awesome metaphor, 100% agree with this. That's why I've always said that the SPA architecture with a separate backend is a way to increase the amount of work so that it can be distributed to more people/teams.

It baffles me when I see single developer or small team projects going for this.

As a developer I like doing CSR apps. As an user I like when my sites are SSRed. There are people who are trying to bridge the gap. https://dev.to/ryansolid/server-rendering-in-javascript-why-... https://dev.to/this-is-learning/conquering-javascript-hydrat...

Now that the end-user is essentially using their browser as a thick client for that RIA/SPA, and the client-server interaction primarily supplies certification and replication services, we can congratulate ourselves on having more-or-less reinvented Lotus Notes.

And a poorly implemented reinvention at that.

Ouch, that hit too close to home :/ It's too early for whiskey where I live.

because scraping and indexing the site is hard.

because getting first response on super slow speeds doesn't accomplish anything

because many js devs write buggy code that renders in their browser

etc

Fantastic if you ever could anticipate having multiple different consuming clients.

Otherwise it's fantastically over-engineered IMO.

I don't see it as anymore over-engineered than SSR.

In traditional SSR, using a template language, you craft a query and expose your variables to your template.

In SPA, you craft a query and expose your variables through an API.

In my opinion (and experience, this architecture is great as a way to scale teams, having a clear interface between them.

As soon as you have to work on both sides of the API, it is not and advantage anymore.

I think separating the backend from the frontend is a way to increase the amount of work required in order to gain a saner way to split it into chunks for different teams.

As a single person, or a small team, doing an SPA and an API only backend, if not done for learning purposes then it is just either madness or CV padding, or something else....makes no sense at all to me.

Let's say you're a mobile user on a 3G network, which a lot of our users are. With a SSR app (that's cached behind Cloudflare), they can see a document in about 100ms max.

With a fully client-side rendered app, you're talking multiple, multiple seconds while they're staring at a blank white screen.

Try it in real life and you'd quickly see your idea would be a terrible user experience.

Why would it take multiple, multiple seconds to download JS bundle (cached behind Cloudflare) and then make a request for initial data (probably also cached behind Cloudflare)? Overhead of downloading most of the app is likely less than that of loading a single hero image from said website.

On 3G and even low 4G it absolutely would. I've seen it. Also, a lot of mobile devices do not have as strong processing power as you think. Parsing and executing that much JavaScript also adds time.

SSR would make HN better under load when logged in, for example. When logged in you would get the cached versions like a logged out person, and then wait for user-specific content (and if it never renders, you can always just read).

As far as I can tell, HN is rendered on the server.

I meant SSR as in what nextjs does. Render on the server using front end tech, cache for performance and then rehydrate in the front end for up to date data.

They should have called it Server Side React Initial Rendering maybe :-)

SSR (2012ish, debatable) long predates Lighthouse (2018). If you mean that SSR is only a thing because people want pages to load quickly, however, then I'll completely agree with you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com