[eric4smith]

Most SPA is totally unnecessary and a big waste of time.

People are worrying about the speed of SSR when they should be worrying about the developer time on the client which is several orders of magnitude more.

I think people have fallen in love so much with complex Javascript frameworks that they’ve forgotten how easy it is to get to an MVP with SSR.

Speed is important.

Speed of development is even more important for businesses in this era who have to get to revenue faster.

And that’s why things like Phoenix LiveView and its counterparts in other languages is catching on so quickly.

People are getting fatigued with the latest flavor of the month JS framework.

But what do I know… I’m just a lowly “developer” working for crumbs. Never even finished a CS degree. Sigh.

[zarzavat]

For simple projects it really doesn't make much difference. Depending on your available tools, client-side or server-side rendering might be easier. In the end the only difference is what is going down the wire: data or HTML.

That said, client-side rendering is strictly more general than server-side rendering. So I prefer to use client-side rendering everywhere so that I don't have to switch between two different modalities and maintain two sets of tooling (or worse switch in the middle of a project!) I gather this is against the current fashion but whatever.

[DangitBobby]

There comes a point in a project where the amount of client-side features requested makes you wish you had started with a fully-fledged modern framework like React. New features could be a single React component plus some updates to existing callbacks, and a new API call, but instead requires adding to a big accreting ball of HTML templates and a hodge-podge of vanilla (and maybe jQuery) js amounting to a bespoke framework that someone had to develop to manage the complexity.

I absolutely love Django and old-style web frameworks, but they are not without their own complexity risks.

[eric4smith]

Makes HUGE difference. All the front-end work is another complete app with all the work that entails.

[javaunsafe2019]

Wow, big claims of gains without any proof. Why?