SEO was our first concern, but then we realized performance was the big win. Serving the user a full page of HTML rather than waiting for JS to download before rendering HTML makes a big difference, especially on high-latency or low-bandwidth connections (mobile).

EDIT: We decided against using something like PhantomJS or node-chimera because why deal with a DOM if you don't have to? DOM is complicated and slow, compared to string-based templating. Plus, it's another moving part, another process to keep up and running. The Meteor guys aren't too excited about the PhantomJS approach either, and IIRC they'd like to be able to serve HTML without firing up a DOM.

Or Zombie, which is way faster than PhantomJS: https://github.com/bfirsh/otter

I want to see them start open sourcing more of their i18n and translation tools. Most people aren't aware of this, but one of the coolest problems you can work on at AirBnB is building out tools and features that let two people, who don't speak a common language between them, transact with one another. There is no other startup I know of as vested in solving this problem.

It's great to see AirBnb's open sourced work, and tech talks, etc. Kudos to them - I'm sure it helps a lot with recruiting. I used to work for a company in a similar space and looked to AirBnb with deep envy.

My girlfriend's brother works there. Based on what I've heard from him, I'm pretty jealous, but she's worried if I worked there I'd never come home.

Indeed it does. Thanks for the heads up, we'll change that.

Thanks, fixed.

That is how Backbone and all other current frameworks work.

At the time of the previous post, Rendr was not yet open-sourced.

The big change is that I missed the previous post, but noticed this one :)

What do you mean by "where everyone stands"?

I agree that there are so many JS libs/frameworks now that it is hard to keep up with! I actually started on a super simple script for myself to compare git repos general stats.

> Does anyone have a link to a good rundown of where everyone stands?

Well, even if I had one, it would be outdated in 2 weeks..

Being a JS developer must be the pits - you need to run really fast just to keep up.

Angular uses DOM templating instead of string-based templating (most current JS templating engines are string-based), so you would definitely need to fire up a headless browser (PhantomJS) or DOM (JSDOM) of some sort to get it working.

It would be very slow if you were doing this dynamically so you would probably want to regularly compile and cache your pages.

Some links on this topic: https://github.com/steeve/angular-seo http://www.yearofmoo.com/2012/11/angularjs-and-seo.html

The first thing I thought of that is similar to Rendr is http://meteor.com/ . I'm not sure about how it works with Angular. It does describe itself as a framework where Rendr describes itself as a library, so I'd think it'd be easier to run Angular stuff on top of Rendr.

I don't work there, but I doubt it. With rendr, both the client- and server-side portions of the Backbone stack still need to consume an upstream API. If I had to guess, I'd say that for projects they're building that use this stack, all the templating/rendering/presentation logic is in JS, but that the database interaction stuff probably isn't; they probably have Rails apps that expose a RESTful API that the rendr apps consume.

IIRC, they are using node.js and rendr for their mobile site and still use Rails for the main website.

Node/JS won't necessarily render HTML faster. There are libraries to bring DOM interaction into NodeJS, there's also PhantomJS, and previous attempts like Aptana's server. All of these have been very heavy, and didn't scale well. PhantomJS is probably the best current option, but doesn't tie directly to Node, and still not as fast as string based templating.

Regarding string based templates, they are really implementation dependant, and there are tons of options available. Right now some common ones for NodeJS are probably Bliss (Razor inspired), Nunjucks (jinja2 inspired), Mustache/Handlebars and Jade (Haml inspired), and EJS (similar to PHP, or classic ASP).

Probably the most broadly available is Mustache, which has implementations in about every language under the sun, and probably could make a decent benchmark to compare string processing in different languages.

All of the above simply bring me, to use what you feel comfortable with and what feels right.

Faster than what? V8 can be an order of magnitude faster than Ruby: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te...