Building Isomorphic JavaScript Apps

Chapter 11. Closing Thoughts

Jason Strimpel

We covered a lot of material in Part II, which provided a solid understanding of how isomorphic JavaScript applications work. Armed with this knowledge you can now evaluate and amend existing solutions, or create something entirely new to meet your specific needs. However, before you venture out into this brave new world, a bit of reflection on what we have covered will help you to be even better equipped to take the next steps into isomorphic development. We will begin this process with a quick review of what we built in Part II, why we built it, and its limitations.

Production Readiness

Throughout Part II we progressively built an application core and a simple example that leveraged the core. While this was instrumental in learning the concepts, we don’t recommend using this core in a production application. The core was written solely for this book as a learning device. There are better production-ready libraries for handling common functionality like managing session history, such as history. history and other modules were intentionally not utilized in order to focus on learning the underlying concepts and native APIs as opposed to learning a library API. However, leveraging highly adopted and well-supported open source solutions is a good idea because these libraries will likely cover edge cases that we might not have accounted for in our code.

Knowing How Much Structure Is Needed

In Part II we emphasized creating a common request/response ...