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by kokanee 1536 days ago
I'm with lhorie. SSR literally is about serving strings... you're the one equating it with server-side JSX. JSX is syntactical sugar that abstracts vanilla JS which in turn renders strings.

Rendering HTML on the server has always been the standard way of doing it, so the whole concept of SSR is funny to me. We've been creating new abstractions that trade old problems for new problems, and then newer abstractions that trade out problems again, since the dawn of time.

2 comments

My point is that it doesn't matter, serving strings or rendering react comps. For folks who has to work with jsx + ssr for one reason or another, they will appreciate what deno's team has done here.

And yeah sure, you can always take a simple demo app with Declarative components and turn it into a few lines of imperative vanilla code and say it's simpler this way. But then what? How are you tackling scaling, organization, composability, and deployment? (these are the real things the deno team is trying to show here, are they not?) By the time you design everything out and put all these in place for your vanilla code, you'll end up spending just as much resources (if not more) as you'd have for using Declarative components with deno.

What I was trying to get at is that whether you have to work with JSX or whatever, that doesn't really have much correlation with Deno per se. CRA/Next/Remix give you decent JSX setups out of the box too (for scopes where JSX is actually justifiable), and so on for all the popular framework flavors, so it kinda doesn't do Deno any justice to say what amounts to "hey look, it can do the most basic of things when you pull in a bunch of libs".

If the point of the article was to highlight a super simple, no-fuss edge computing deployment thing, maybe it would have been better to lead with that? Because if you lead w/ "A whole static website in a single JS file", then let's not blame me for pointing out that that's a relatively trivial task to accomplish with other technologies.

Yes, you are certainly not alone on that. The headline could be made better. Focus should be more on the composability and tooling side of things.
Agree 100%. The first time I heard the term "Server side rendering" I wondered what the hell it meant! Must have been coined by the new-fangled DOM-manipulator army. Modern web development is a big, clunky, slow mess, and for no good reason.