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by underwater 3274 days ago
Whether JavaScript is a good fit for a news site and whether news sites should be single page apps are two separate questions. It's possible to build a server rendered React app without requiring any client JavaScript execution at all.

News sites are also more complex than you would assume. I went from building products at Facebook to a large news site. What shocked me was the surface area of the user facing products. There were so many little one-off pieces of functionality and randomly integrated services. Tools like React and Relay make it much easier to manage this complexity and promote code reuse.
1 comments
est 3273 days ago
> It's possible to build a server rendered React app

What's the advantage of server rendered React app over server rendered anything e.g. php jsp etc?

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underwater 3273 days ago
You can make use of the JavaScript ecosystem. React is a nice was to structure code. There are a tonne of modules available on npm, etc. If and when you do want to build client elements you can reuse parts of your code.

That said, I'm not aware of anyone doing this at scale. I know the BBC were considering it. My company will be using it to product AMP pages from our JS stack.

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potench 3270 days ago
Being done at scale here: https://www.nfl.com/super-bowl Plans to release solution across ecosystem by August Based on open-source universal app here: https://github.com/nfl/react-wildcat

Documentation and infrastructure setup for this project aren't great at the moment, but will get a facelift shortly.

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