[BinaryIdiot]

Rather than running JS on the server, one way I found things to be effective is using any server side templating capability to basically "bootstrap" what the JS might typically do on start-up. So the server renders you a page that looks well formed and then the JS hooks into it for client interactions.

The issue that can be runned into here is possibly duplicating efforts on the server and JS side. You can keep them separate enough but it's tough if you're used to creating everything either through the server or through JS on the client.

The last web app I worked on like this is unfortunately not public but performed rather well and wasn't all that difficult to maintain either.

[irq11]

This is called “progressive enhancement”, and is, in fact, the way that you’re supposed to write webpages: they should come pre-rendered, and only if the client has JS enabled do you enable more dynamic features. You fall back to full pageloads to handle form submissions with not-very-clever coding, and can usually preserve most of the functionality of a webapp even without JS.

Until about 5-6 years ago, this was the way people tried to write webapps (they didn’t always get there, but at least they aimed for it). It’s really startling that it’s something that people have already forgotten.

It really isn’t terribly difficult to do this. Frameworks like Rails make it pretty easy to do, out of the box.

[arvinsim]

> This is called “graceful degradation”,

Isn't that strategy "progressive enhancement"?

https://www.w3.org/wiki/Graceful_degradation_versus_progress...

[irq11]

Yes, it is. I corrected my post around the same time you replied. I’ve colloquially used the term I originally cited, but the correct term is progressive enhancement.