I'm not sure what you're trying to argue. SSR sites and apps still have scripting and client-side interactivity, the only difference is where the rendering is happening. That's what SSR stands for. SSR switches from APIs exchanging JSON with heavy client-side rendering, to REST endpoints returning hypertext which eliminates the majority of client-side rendering.
How would you implement Google Maps as a SSR app? -- same question for ArcGIS, Figma, an arcade game, or a Zoom clone. It's a serious question -- do you think that would be possible for any of those?
I contend that to build a coherent, usable web app of any of those types, there has to be a lot of client-side scripting. Hence, a SPA is the best architectural pattern.
Sure, you could use SSR for the layout of the page... but in that case, why not skip HTML rendering altogether by shipping raw HTML/CSS for the app's layout? Then you'd only need JS to power the contents of <div>s where the app's functionality is located.
> How would you implement Google Maps as a SSR app? -- same question for ArcGIS, Figma, an arcade game, or a Zoom clone. It's a serious question -- do you think that would be possible for any of those?
> I contend that to build a coherent, usable web app of any of those types, there has to be a lot of client-side scripting. Hence, a SPA is the best architectural pattern.
"Lot's of scripting" does not automatically entail "SPA".
That's a very impressive demo of Datastar, and I like his minimalist approach to frontend architecture.
However, the display logic is implemented as a web component containing (a) a lot of tags written as a big HTML file for streaming state from the backend, and (b) a canvas element rendered by a WASM component. If that fits your definition of SSR for frontend apps, no problem and I think it's great. But that's not what I would have defined as SSR.
Some hurdles I imagine Datastar will need to overcome before this pattern can see widespread adoption:
- there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to statically bind the frontend markup to the backend, so scaling this to multi-team apps will be a challenge.
- the markup and associated binding feels very similar to template-driven SPA frameworks (data- attributes for everything, really? That's fine in the resulting DOM tree but it's got to be a pain to author and maintain for large apps). Perhaps if someone could build a JSX-like code-to-markup DSL, that problem could be ameliorated.
- he is demoing it from his local machine, so we don't get to see (a) how much server-side compute is required at any scale (even >10 users), (b) how strongly latency can affect rendering, and (c) overall bandwidth requirements.
That being said, I know video game companies have streaming games deployed, so in theory this approach has merit (though I suspect only users who lack beefy home computers and have great internet connections opt for it).
Overall, this feels like less of an indictment of the SPA pattern in general* and more of a "let's see what happens if we change what we assume the constraints are."
*Yes, he's right that a lot of modern SPA development tooling is terrible. Dojo from the 2000s is still arguably easier to develop in than most modern SPA frontend stacks, especially since it can be run with only a static file server, no build required.
I'm not indicting anything, I'm simply pointing out that there are a lot of assumptions that SPAs are the only or best way to have a great user experience, that server interactions are slow, that DOM updates are slow, and that API-based SPAs are the only way to solve all of these issues. The Datastar demo disproves all of these, regardless of how you feel about Datastar's specific approach to it.
Which leads me back to my original point that the only feature an SSR can't intrinsically provide is offline functionality.
