| > If you look closely, rendering presentation layer on the server side and then sending it to the client is a hack and we've been doing it for a long time. It's time for changes. From the view/presentation layer's perspective, it shouldn't matter where the rendering happens, and as a programmer working on these systems I'm tired of baking assumptions about the data layer into the view layer. I actually think there's a best-of-both-worlds solution that we'll converge on at some point, which is this: We have the option of rendering in both locations with the same code. This allows the initial render to be offloaded to the server (so that the app's initial state is totally established and can be sent along with the app itself in a single HTTP request), and then subsequent rendering updates could happen mostly client-side (fetching only the raw data from the server where necessary). This allows the JS-everywhere crowd to build their entire app as if all logic is running in-browser (with only a basic API on the server), but it appeases the more old-fashioned developers who want to be able to construct mappings between URLs and actual HTML documents (that don't have to be spun up and re-constructed using client-side scripting). There's obviously a huge debate here as to whether or not the latter is worth it, but I'd say it would be nice if only so that I don't need to have a flash of unloaded content or a "loading" indicator before the app is ready to be used. I also don't like having to use PhantomJS to scrape data from a website that could very easily consist of HTML documents instead of a blob of JS, but that's probably not enough to affect most people's opinions. |