Building Isomorphic JavaScript Apps

Chapter 15. “Colony” Case Study: Isomorphic Apps Without Node

Patrick Kunka, Richard Davis, and Andrew Barker

Colony is a global film-streaming platform connecting content owners with passionate fans through exclusive extra content. In a landscape of significant competition, our go-to-market strategy relies heavily on a world-class product and user experience, with ambitions to redefine the way film is consumed online.

The Problem

An important differentiation between Colony’s video-on-demand model and that of competitors like Netflix is our transactional business model: content on our platform is open to the public to browse and purchase on a pay-as-you-go basis, and isn’t hidden behind a subscription paywall. We benefit from letting Google crawl and index our entire catalogue as a result. On top of this, the nature of our product requires a dynamic user interface that must frequently update to reflect changes to a complex application state. For example, elements must update to reflect whether the user is signed in or not, and whether the content bundle (or parts of it) is owned or at a certain point in its rental period. While our initial prototype was built using out-of-the-box ASP.NET MVC, we soon realized that turning our frontend into a single-page app would vastly improve our ability to deal with these challenges, while also enabling our backend and frontend teams to work independently of one another by “decoupling” the stack.

We were therefore faced with the dilemma of ...