We have a website that's running AngularJS 1.*
but one of our main clients are military personnel and they frequently attempt to use the site via Department of Defense computers. These, of course, have javascript disabled.
I've heard of doing server side rendering, but the majority of the examples and research just mention using it for the initial load. We would need the entire site to run off that principle. Essentially acting like an old MVC site. Is this even possible? And I don't mean with just angularJS. Angular 2(5, whatever version we're on now), or react. I just really don't want to back track to .net MVC
Edit: I realize this is, for all intents, a silly question. I was just hoping there was some awesome new tech that had solved the issues that would be present in even attempting this (as stated below, data-binding. I realize this concept completely defeats the purpose of SPAs)
Thanks anyways. I may just delete this question. Didn't have too many expectations to begin with.
This is very possible! Don't let the rest of the people here fool you.
We have a few websites that work just fine with or without JavaScript enabled. My company website https://bitgenics.io is a React app. If you disable your JavaScript the only thing that won't work is the client-side video player.
Now I have no experience with Angular 1 (and I have heard SSR is hard there), but support should be better in the later versions of it.
Getting the GETs to work is the first challenge. But the next one is that you have to have a fallback for your HTTP POSTs. SPAs often use straight REST calls to do any state changes, but you can't do that because it requires JS on the client.
So your forms have to a fallback of a regular FORM post. So you might need some server-side logic to receive these POSTs and respond with a Server-Side Rendered page again.
Related
I am little bit in confusion about this mechanism. Not sure this is the right way or platform to ask this, but might be I can get some idea at least.
I am working on a web app which has been already live for a long time. I have redesigned whole app with frontend technology of ReactJS and backed in spring boot. As the existing old web app (live web-app) is written in Spring MVC with bootstrap support and which is outdated. Now, we are done with the updated app code, and we are ready to make it live.
Is there any way to give user flexibility to use both web app at same time? Like existing web app which they are using and there will be one button or option from where they can able to get updated UI/UX. And the same thing If they are not feeling well with the new UI/UX they can switch back to old/existing web app.
It is little bit similar like Facebook did a time ago where they give option to "Switch back to classic".
For now, I have one idea in mind to give this support based on subdomain, but not sure is that a good way or technical feasible or not.
I have this project where I have to code a website and ios and android apps.
I have to do this with a very limited team (basically myself). So I want to share as much code between those platforms, to avoid maintaining different codebases as much as possible.
I have come to consider flutter : the logic (and interaction with the backend) in dart can be compiled to both ios and android, and to javascript for the web site to call. I also like how the UI is built using flutter.
For the web site, I know there is flutter web that can be used to do a web app, but I want my website to feel like a web site more than a single page app. I have thought about using React+Gatsby to do the website's ui, while calling the dart compiled js for the logic. That would enable high page loading speed, good seo, while keeping the interactivity of a react app and the single codebase logic through dart to js compilation.
I am wondering if this seems like a good approach to you, and if not, how you would do it.
In this approach, I am wondering if it would be possible to embedded flutter web widgets inside of react js components, always in a concern of maintaining as low platform specific code as possible. I have not found any other way of doing this than embedding them into iframes, which does not seem like a good idea, or does it ?
Update
Flutter Web is now available in a stable version for production.
Below answer is relevant back to the time when question was asked.
Flutter Web not recommended
At the current date, I would recommend not to use Flutter Web for production as it's in Beta. The Flutter Team is still working on improving quality, performance and browser compatibility. You must be cautious about using it as you may run into bugs and some other complications.
Also, I believe that the community support for Flutter Web might be on a lower side as it's pretty new.
Limited browser support
Another factor which bugs me is that the Flutter web apps can run on limited browsers as of now which would affect the reach to your user base:
Chrome (mobile & desktop)
Safari (mobile & desktop)
Edge (mobile & desktop)
Firefox (desktop)
What would I prefer?
Well, although it might be a hassle to handle different codebases for mobile and web platforms, I would still prefer to stick with React JS as it's much stable with better browser & community support as opposed to Flutter Web.
Good luck with your app! :)
I am unaware of how to use Flutter widgets inside a React app. But to address your other concerns,
So I want to share as much code between those platforms, to avoid maintaining different codebases as much as possible.
Given no other restrictions, this leads to a single Flutter app for both web and native. For a team as small as three we still found it easier than having multiple projects.
The key factor in merging our initial projects to one was the notion of mobile browsers. In a mobile browser you website should reduce itself to the look of your mobile app, unless they have different purposes. And this automatically happens with Flutter projects if you derive your layout breakpoints from screen size. Otherwise you would code your same narrow design twice: in Flutter for native apps and in React for web.
Same goes for native apps for tablets in landscape mode. They call for a layout that resembles your desktop browser version, and you automatically get it with Flutter.
Also in web version you may have more tools than in a native app, just because your screen allows it. Naturally, you would code this logic in JS. But then you get an order to migrate this to native apps. Would you then replace your JS logic with Dart logic compiled to JS and embedded into frames? This is a messy road.
Lastly, think of Mac, Linux and Windows platforms that will come to Flutter soon. Should you ever need a desktop native app, you would want the same layout as with web.
I want my website to feel like a web site more than a single page app.
The difference in feeling between a website and a single page app lies mostly in state management and URL handling. You may do the following to reduce it:
Introduce URLs for your pages. By default, in Flutter every piece of action can happen under a single URL of example.com/#/. The window then feels fragile as there is no URL to copy and get back to. Flutter's Router API, released in Oct 2020, allows you to generate URLs on any change in your app's state and parse the state back from URL. If you do it right, then everything on your screen becomes a function of the URL, just like in traditional websites.
Use url_stragegy package for your URLs to be example.com/path rather than example.com/#/path which immediately feels fake.
I have not found any other way of doing this than embedding them into iframes, which does not seem like a good idea, or does it ?
No, it does not. Mostly because you get too narrow a channel of communication of messages between JS windows. How would you listen to Flutter's BLoC's stream in another frame? It would take too much boilerplate code. Also I cannot think of easy debugging process.
To me, Flutter Web still has drawbacks:
It takes awhile to load.
Many specific JS APIs are not implemented yet.
Many services you integrate with may not have Dart SDK, while having JS SDK. For instance, I struggled to get Ably working.
No search engine optimization.
You cannot use em as a screen unit, so scaling elements may get tricky.
Still with limited resources a single codebase outweights everything else.
To be clear, my team has been working on a web+native project the whole 2021. It now has passed most of the testing, but not yet released. For a sense of scale, it is a marketplace of 40+ screens.
I am still quite confused about REST API, Angular and so on.
I would like to build simple web app which allows users to book events and I would like to do it in Symfony 3 + Angular.
In future, I could make it work on mobile phones as well.
The reason I want to do it is to learn symphony 3, REST API and Angular better and to increase chance I will get hired.
I have few questions:
1) Apart of the fact I am going to learn Angular what is the real benefit of using Angular rather than twig templates and HTML for the front end ?
2) As far I have seen people usually suggesting light weight frameworks to build REST API. Why would not they suggest symphony ?
3) What would you suggest to build to show you have got good skill set to get hired ?
1) Angular a complete framework. In your case, you would use angular as front end. This would be two options.
First one is completely using Angular, Symfony serves the RESTful API. Then twig is not involved anymore.
The other is used Angular within twig, acting like a server side rendering Angular. This way is not very common right now, rather less examples could be found.
In any case, Angular could provide single-page application, which could give your users better user experience, faster load speed, move the html view part completely to browser(make server less tasks regarding rendering the view). You could also achieve this by using twig+javascript, but it would be a bit more complex depends on your skills.
But in my opinion, the best benefits would be separate the frontend and backend from architecture perspective.
2) Symfony is a very complete PHP framework. Building a REST API is only an example of using Symfony. And in this way, some features from Symfony could not be used. I would say some lightweight framework would deliver the same result as using Symfony. It would also be easier using some lightweight framework(less code, less configuration, etc.). However, the performance of Symfony and large community might also need to take into consideration when you choose the right framework.
3) Always a good protfolio by showing your experience and skills.
What is the point of server side rendering in React/Redux?
It would seem to me that another level of complexity is being added to the software, but I don't really see the benefit of it.
What are some common use cases for server side rendering?
React's SSR (Server Side Rendering) offers some benefits over CSR (Client Side Rendering):
1. Improved (Perceived) performance at the client side
Obviously, rendered components are shown to the user right away without the need to wait for browser to render. The website won't be interactive until all React code are loaded and executed, but the perceived performance is improved by showing content to users ASAP.
2. Better SEO
Since content are rendered at the server side, search engine crawlers can see the rendered content instead of just a blank page with JS tags.
Note: Google crawler supports JavaScript rendering, not sure about other Search Engines though.
Interms of complexity - yes, SSR introduced extra complexity but there's always a tradeoff for each technical decision.
The whole point of so called Universal apps or "Isomorphic JavaScript" is its "write once, run everywhere" kind of motto. Meaning that you wouldn't need to maintain a specific backend project and a specific frontend project differing in techniques and instead consolidate a whole JavaScript project into one.
It's not quite as dandy as you'd think because you still need to maintain a backend specific part that handles the initial GET request.
Furthermore you also leverage the Single Page nature of an application whilst getting the server side first page load making your website 100% crawlable by the Googs, even though Google now crawls SPAs quite competently currently.
As for complexity - it could be as complex or as simple as you would want to, I guess. Not everything is solved by doing a "Universal app" nor is everything solved by doing a standard web app either.
I know what angular.js is and I even had a question about it #Why use AngularJs in frontend if Laravel is already used as backend?.
but recently I started to read about React.js and from its site (its the V in the MVC) which is exactly what am after "handling the view and nothing else".
for me, I think Angular.js as an MVC framework was made to be used with something that is built with JavaScript from start to end like Node.js
and it seems like an overkill when used with something like Larval, where I simply need something to handle the frontend and nothing else + Angular have 2 main drawbacks
with the latest news about a new version that won't have back compatibility with the current version makes me even feared to start learning it just to find that more or less every project out there is using the old version which mostly is true.
angular renders the whole dom if anything got changed which again is an issue for big projects.
so based on the above, plz note that I want to learn/use JS solely to enhance the user experience not to build another Gmail or Facebook and so my question is,
could React.js be used with Laravel to handle the view and do everything Angular was going to give, or I have to use Angular liked or not?
could React.js be used with Laravel to handle the view and do everything Angular was going to give?
No
React is just for views. React components are stateful components with some really clever rendering stuff happening behind the scenes. To build a fully functional front-end app, you'd need to tie in some other code (or write it yourself).
React works well with Facebook's Flux architecture. I would suggest looking into that to learn how to manage the state of your react components.
What's key to understand here is that Flux and React are not parts of a large front-end framework. React is a library and Flux (as provided by Facebook) only provides a Dispatcher. The rest is up to you to implement. There are some pre-existing implementations you can look at if you need some help to get started.
What I like about flux is that it allows me implement things the way that fits my application best. React takes care of the heavy DOM lifting and is very easy to learn. Compared to Angular, I don't have to learn arbitrary conventions and gigantic APIs of a huge framework.