EXTREME SERVER SIDE RENDERING
EXTREME SERVER SIDE RENDERING
Before we get into extreme server side rendering (XSSR), we have to talk about normal server side rendering (SSR). This comes in two flavours, which I'm calling old-school and new-school.
Old-school SSR involves having a server which uses some logic to create the HTML of the web page on-the-fly. For example, you might hit /users/39, and it might give you the details of user 39. These details might be from a database, or they might come from somewhere else. The important part is there's no corresponding 39.html on the disk. The HTML is created dynamically by the back-end server. On the front-end side, there's no JavaScript or other logic required to render the page. As a result, once the page is loaded, there's no ability for it to be dynamic.
New-school SSR is similar to old-school SSR, but it does involve a bit of front-end JavaScript logic.
This is gloriously insane and I love it.
And then to casually drop in that
spoiler (just RTFA, it's short)
it uncovered a Pleroma bug by accidentally DOSing any instance that tried to generate a link preview... chef's kiss
This reminds me of something (far, far simpler) that I did long ago. I wrote a small webapp that continually queried various servers and would keep the connection open to push new <div> blocks as the server-side async queries completed. I ran into output-buffering issues (probably from the reverse-proxy server, but I can't be certain at this point) and ended up appending a 1K block of commented-out non-printing unicode characters to ensure it would get flushed to the browser. I called it the plunger. Probably not the best solution 😅
Very neat! The game was playable here in Ontario on fiber.