Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

Isomorphic JavaScript applications

However, everything has its drawbacks, and SPAs are no exception. The most obvious shortcoming of SPAs is that more code needs to be transferred at the beginning, which can increase the initial load time of the page. To counteract this deficiency, a technique called server-side rendering (SSR) can be employed.

With SSR, the initial page is processed and rendered on the server in the same way as the traditional client-server model. However, the returned HTML contains a tag that'll request the rest of the application to be downloaded at a later time, after the initial page has been successfully rendered. This allows us to improve the initial page load speed, whilst keeping all the benefits of the SPA. Furthermore, ...