Universal JavaScript

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This talk will first cover the reasons why you might want to run your client side application on the server:

• this enables users without JS enabled to use your application, hence increasing your audience;

• it also solves the common SPA problem of search engine crawlers being unable to fully read the site;

• by building the site this way round, you can build for non-JS clients and then layer JS support on, meaning we can give users with JS an incredibly snappy site without compromising.

Jack will share with you a briefly overview of the reasons why you’re able to do this, and how the trend of ReactJS’s abstractions have lead the way here. By removing data binding and unifying the flow of data, it removes the complexity that is impossible to replicate on the server. You'll also learn about some side benefits of this approach, including much easier testing. ReactJS is used here as the example, but EmberJS is also taking this approach and Jack expects other frameworks too in the future.

You will then explore how to build these applications, using React as the example and using Webpack as the build tool. Jack will demonstrate how to configure Webpack to generate client side bundles for your application whilst running React on the server through NodeJS. You'll discover the development workflow and some additional 3rd party tools that make building these apps as straight forward as they can be.

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