[dlau1]

Have you tried react.js [1] ? If you use node to serve your content, you can pre-render the initial state of your app. When everything loads up, react will take a checksum of the rendered portions to ensure that it doesn't re-render the same DOM. This should come close to solving your SEO/test issues with minimal work.

In my opinion, a setup like this is close to what the next big wave of frameworks will use.

You can break your layout up into parts and have a site that is partially dynamic and partially static. You just pass the html that react renders to your templating engine.

Getting everything setup correctly can be a little hassle, but gulp is fast enough when doing a watch on the compilation step. Of course, because everything is javascript you share the exact same component code between client and server.

This is a good example that helped me a bit[2]

[1] http://facebook.github.io/react/ [2] https://github.com/mhart/react-server-example

[sqs]

Haven't tried it, but I heard great things about it from bradfitz, who uses it on http://camlistore.org/ (and whose opinion definitely deserves respect). Is React an all-or-nothing thing, or can you sprinkle it in certain places on your site without needing to make the whole site in React?

[dlau1]

The great thing about it is that you can sprinkle it in just where you need to have some dom manipulation.

TBH, a lot of sites really overdo the client-side rendering thing.

[danabramov]

We're replacing one Backbone view at a time as soon as they need to get more dynamic. So far I'm impressed.

[frio]

  > you can pre-render the initial state of your app

This, I think, is the killer feature of Node, and the reason I'm slowly transitioning from Python for new web projects. You can reuse your server-side templates client-side (without worrying about, say, reimplementing Handlebars Helpers in your server-side language), and can easily render full HTML templates for the client that get enhanced when the client-side JS loads. This also solves UI nuisances -- like your server's markdown renderer being different to your client-side preview (grr).

Meteor and Derby are obviously heading down this path, and while I'm not sold on the rest of Node and the general JS style, having the same language in the browser and the server is too much to pass up.

[potench]

If you're coming from python, I'd recommend the 'swig' template library. Django syntax in node and client-side.