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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

You can also have both. Our apps are all spa. Bundled in single js, html and and js file. But we also have an ssr app runner that contains hundreds of thousands cached static html pages. Initial page load is from the ssr. Further interaction pure clientside. This way you have best app like experience and maximum seo. Setup is maybe 400 lines of code.

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> Bundled in single js, html and and js file. But we also have an ssr app runner ...

This is exactly the kind of complexity and bloat the GP wishes we can get rid of so that we can return to simpler web applications with forms that do a simple POST and get the updated web page in response.

Would you mind elaborating some more on how this works?

Basically serverside you have a simple route app that is able to run the web applications through a headless chrome instance. The output is cached in static html files. Now when the initial site is served to the end users browser from then on all interactions are all dynamic. This setup works for all kinds of stacks. Angular, vue, react or just custom. The logic is pretty simple. No bloated layers of complexity.

Interesting, thanks very much.

To clarify, the headless chrome is because it's ultimately a js-rendered app, so you just pre-render all the routes on the server to get the final html, cache that, then serve the html on any first request. Then when the app is loaded in the browser, it just does everything client-side?

Indeed. Thats how it works. Of course when your website is pure html you can simply return the html content. No need to go through a headless browser.

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