Show HN: I've created an example project for Server-Driven UI with documentation

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5 points·csmets··4 comments

Best practices for Server-Driven UI (SDUI) is hard to find or is unclear. I've worked with it for a number of years and have created this repository to share my learning. I hope this gives some clarity to what SDUI can do. It's a project that will continue to grow and feel free to share/express/educate/hate/love some feedback.

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What's the difference between SDUI and SSR (server side rendering) aka how the web used to work before angular, vue, react, etc

Good question! SSR and SDUI share some similarities in that they both provide a presentation output for the client to paint. The major difference is that SSR is web focused. Mobile app can't do what web does unless the app is just a web view which isn't ideal - limited to no offline support.

Also, before these front end frameworks existed the presentation and data is coupled together in the back end. Or at least the separation of concerns tends to not be clear and business logic and UI (non-abstract like SDUI is but actual DOM elements) is often tangled together in the backend.

Having that separation for web is great imo. Tooling like react SSR can help with performance. The biggest gain is for mobile apps and for enterprise businesses that want to build a platform.

In summary, healthy discussions between front-end and back-end engineers would need to be made in SDUI, but the code will live separately. Whereas, now we have front-end and back-end engineers not communicating to each other and letting product drive the conversation. Legacy SSR is a bit of a mess with UI templates and server-side code coupled together.

Great project. Currently using react native + nodejs server. Will check out this project

Thank you for taking interest

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