Tom Dale

It is unfortunately that this site doesn't do Isomorphic JavaScript justice because it is actually a very powerful concept and is being more widely adopted than indicated.

First, as far as adoption, some of the other comments mention React, but Ember is also moving toward Isomorphic JS (see http://tomdale.net/). I have been working on something similar for AngularJS.

As far as the benefits or why you would care, there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Some commenters mention why bother since Google now indexes content rendered by client side JavaScript. My answer to this in short is that there is a big difference between a search engine indexing content and a search engine ranking a site highly. For at least the near future we have no idea how much search engines actually are able to capture and it would be difficult for search engines to rank client side web apps and server side websites evenly (i.e. due to the massive history and trust with server side rendered websites). This may change over time, but it does not change overnight.

2. SEO is a benefit of Isomorphic JavaScript, but it is not IMHO the primary benefit. The primary benefit comes from being able to create ultra DRY code with one technology, one overarching framework and one way of thinking. There is a lot of power in using the same code in one file at all layers of your stack. To me, Isomorphic JavaScript not only includes the browser client code and the web server code, but also the API, mobile, batch…

> I think especially after your app gets to be a certain size, you are either writing your own framework, or fighting with the framework you chose at the beginning.

I agree with this, but I end up at the opposite conclusion. This post about JavaScript frameworks [1] by Tom Dale puts it nicely:

> I have heard from many developers who have told me that they accepted the argument that vanilla JavaScript or microlibraries would let them write leaner, meaner, faster apps. After a year or two, however, what they found themselves with was a slower, bigger, less documented and unmaintained in-house framework with no community. As apps grow, you tend to need the abstractions that a framework offers. Either you or the community write the code.

[1] https://tomdale.net/2015/11/javascript-frameworks-and-mobile-performance/

For sure. I was always uncomfortable with JS frameworks that used markup with no content from the server. In my professional experience I've also found that developers underestimate how slow Ajax requests are in real world scenarios. I wrote some comments on this when I started learning React, just gonna screenshot them instead of pasting: http://i.imgur.com/XSnCqjK.png

Two great articles I reference in this tutorial:

1) http://tomdale.net/2015/02/youre-missing-the-point-of-server-side-rendered-javascript-apps/

2) http://rauchg.com/2014/7-principles-of-rich-web-applications/

Yes, no one takes the time to research. Most popular does not equate to good.

I took the time to do the research back in 2013 and found that Ember basically solves all the problems OP talks about. Tom Dale, one of the creators of Ember, blogged over a year ago [1] about how Ember has been around since the days of Backbone. As the years rolled on, other frameworks became obsolete, but Ember evolved (with sane upgrade paths) and is still relevant.

1: https://tomdale.net/2017/04/making-the-jump/

So what does this have over ZeptoJS [0] or jQLite [1]? Things like:

// jQuery $() function
function $(element) {
return document.querySelectorAll(element); // Redirects the function to querySelectorAll()
}

Might fly in evergreen browsers [3] but not all (<IE 8, yes this is old but there is no mention of it in the README and some people still need to support this).

[0] http://zeptojs.com/

[1] https://code.google.com/p/jqlite/

[2] http://tomdale.net/2013/05/evergreen-browsers/