[scotty79]

I had my own server side component system in PHP, 20 years ago.

And when the marvel of AJAX happened I enabled some of the components to be requested separately by the client code, rendered and sent to the client to replace the part of the website they occupied when they were rendered when the page was served initially.

Technically it wasn't client side rendering but it wasn't far from it.

And for actual client side rendering I experimented with compiling my HTML templates into XSLT and sending XML with data instead of HTML to the browser and letting it render it to HTML using provided XSLT. Because it was blazing fast when compared to JS at the time.

So, yeah, I guess thank you industry for coming around to what some twentysomething years old made just to build some websites for his freelancing.

[baq]

But you weren’t google so by definition your tech is inferior to state of the art. It was you twenty years ago reinventing the wheel we have now.

[scotty79]

I'm sure that React is engineered way better than not only what I achieved, but also what I could ever hope to achieve. I'm not against React. I'm just saying that it's an implementation of really natural (good?) old ideas. Just in JS.

[throwaway03635]

> And when the marvel of AJAX happened I enabled some of the components to be requested separately by the client code, rendered and sent to the client to replace the part of the website they occupied when they were rendered when the page was served initially.

I did the exact same thing. I made a page with a table that was fully rendered server side. Any change in the display, such as pagination, sorting or filtering would trigger the same PHP code that returned a HTML fragment. The Javascript for that was easy. Just send an AJAX request to the server and replace the <tbody> element with the new content.

The PHP code itself was separated in components which made it easy to share the rendering logic for the initial page and the page used for the AJAX request.

React solves this in a more convenient way, but I am really surprised that we had to wait until 2023 before it happened.