[hnbreak]

People debate SPA vs SSR without any context. Both have their use case:

Everything before a login => SSR, everything after => SPA.

Why? SSR is proven to be much better at SEO. But SPAs offer best UIs. Nobody wants to click through stuttery SSR dashboards in 2019, wait for page loads, submits, etc. People prefer slick UIs, that was one of the reasons DigitalOcean got big (because of their then stunning dashboard or after-login-experience [1]) and hence every other hoster copied their interface.

[1] DigitalOcean's dashboard experience was for a long time the main teaser (as an animated gif/video) on their landing page.

[mhd]

> But SPAs offer best UIs

I don't consider this a settled conclusion. Mostly because it's a false dichotomy. There are alternatives to both SSR of component sites and SPAs, and every solution has its inherent advantages and disadvantages.

UI isn't even the primary feature of an SPA, that would be offline usage.

Having more interactive elements without page loads is a feature of "DHTML", and that can be had from anything between small embedded snippets of vanilla JS to full-fledged SPA frameworks. Intermediate solutions like StimulusJS or AlpineJS seem to be getting a bit more popular, too.

But in this Fallen World, it seems we're usually getting the worst of either extreme usually. Either a long rendering time for a whole page, then delivered in one "flash" (assuming you've got a fast connection), or multiple elements popping in and out while several JSON-RPC requests are made.

You can optimize both cases, of course. Proper caching/DB views etc., or things like HTTP2/GraphQl/React Suspense etc.

But it's definitely not an either/or answer. Few things in fiddling around with computers are.

[hnbreak]

Good point and I agree that the borders between SPA and SSR are blurry. However, I just wanted to stress that a debate without having requirements is useless, it's like saying a racing car is better than a truck. But for what? Building websites is not like building websites 20 years ago. There are many uses cases and saying one is better than the other rather shows that you never experienced the other side. I mean, there are still people out who never touched react, how should they fully grok what mighty system and ecosystem react has created and choosing another stack comes with much smaller or dying ecosystems.

To your points, I still think a proper SPA without any quirks such as DHTML, React Suspense, etc. gives the best UI for dashboard and logged-in kind of uses cases. However, having mixed environments is from a production and dev perspective subpar and hence you end up with setups like Next (SSR) with some Next pages having a stronger SPA notion (SPA within SSR).

[mhd]

Yeah, I never quite liked the currenly en vogue mixed approaches, where it's harder to draw a line, you often have to serve two masters and you feel it's mostly done that way because React developers don't want to learn anything else, despite cases where a complete server-side approach with an old-school template language might be a better fit, despite how hip functional reactive component based development is.

But about the smaller stacks other environments have: That's quite often because you either don't need additional parts (e.g. there's no desire for a huge Django template "community") and/or because other stacks are more full-fledged and thus the horizontal size is a lot smaller, with no need for umpteen state management solutions, state management solution helpers and state management solution application templates.

Dashboards could probably serve as a whole different topic. It was easy to beat the old school ones, where Perl CGIs roamed the prehistoric landscape. More modern CSS, and JS graphs alone beat the old rrdtool setups you often saw.

[hnbreak]

Re your second point: How is the SSR scene in Go land? Are there thriving ecosystems?

Besides, it took me a long to leave pug/stylus, I'am still not sure if a pug-based SSR is still the best way to get stuff out of the door. But again, opting for an 10 years old stack let you miss lot of things (eg maintainability of react code is top-notch).

[mhd]

I don't think I heard "SSR" in a context where it's just about backend HTML generation like we did in the olden days, only when it comes to reify JS views on the server. Haven't heard of an embedded JS interpreter or transpiler that does that.

When it comes to generating dynamic or static web page content, the pathological framework-aversion of the Go community strikes hard. Probably nothing that doesn't use the built-in Go templates with any sufficient user backing. This doesn't appear to be a language that can birth something like RoR.

As for the maintainability of react, I'm not so excited. It's a pretty decent templating system, and it seems easy enough to compose components, but beyond that it's each to their own, with some approaches being better than others. And redux still doesn't grab me as that great, it's just the sheer amount of developers resulted in a nice toolset. Whether it's frontend or backend, the twin async and dependency hells of JS don't manage to make me sleep any better, either.

I don't give a flying frick for age myself. Sure, there's less tooling for partials than for components, but that might have a reason.

[chrismmay]

Thank you for this very practical advice. The thought of trying to dynamically decide whether to render on the client or server side, as the author of this article did, seems so over-the-top complicated to me. Taking your advice is something doable for us mere mortals.