frontendbeauty

> In every software company the people who are the most influential, and the best paid, are in management or sales.

I don't think that's necessarily true in Silicon Valley, where companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, etc. have parallel career tracks for individual contributor vs manager, with equal salary bands. I'm earning way more as a high-level IC than mid-leveled managers.

> Here's the litmus test. Ask the Reactive Native team to port their non-trivial paper app or mission critical messenger app or main app to Reactive Native.

Facebook is rewriting the News Feed in RN. That's not a trivial example.

s/AirBnb/Airbnb/

We've called ourselves "nerds" since the very early days, at least 5 years.

Why couldn't you use a CDN for the JS files? We most certainly do.

There are already two problems, if you're building a rich client-side web app. Have you done this? If so, you would understand the problem.

I like "multiplatform" -- current winner :)

There are a few options. Easiest is to just render HTML strings on the server, not actual DOM. But, you can also use a DOM implementation if you want to, like jsdom or PhantomJS, and then capture the outerHTML of an element as an HTML string to serve. But, that is slower. React.js has a nice middleground approach; it has a fast pure-JavaScript DOM abstraction that can emit either DOM (browser) or HTML (server).

(author here) We just bootstrap some JSON onto the page to transfer application state to the client. It's the same approach as the `express-state` (mentioned in a below comment). Same as any client-side app.

The approach you mention is much easier. However, it does make for slower perceived page load times, even when serializing JSON on the page, because the browser has to fetch, parse, and evaluate JS files before rendering the HTML into the document. This can take many hundreds of milliseconds, especially on mobile devices.

In my experience, server-side rendering has led to a much better UX.

Correct. If you're already writing a bunch of JavaScript for the client-side, then just think about this approach as migrating some of that client, UI logic to the server.

(author) Cool! What's the JavaScript runtime on the server? Something JVM-based?

(OP here) Probably your best bet is to create a small Node web service that takes a template name and data and returns HTML. Then your (Rails, Python, PHP) app can call out to that in the request cycle.

Instagram.com does something similar; it's a Django app.