AngularJS vs ServerSide rendering [closed]

Question

A colleague of mine at work proposed a challenge the other day. The problem: Solve one of our common problems human resource management ie. assigning ppl to projects. The one caveat was we had to do so using a technology that neither of us had used. So we set out building this project using the MEAN stack. Its been a fun learning experience thus far, but it has me wondering.

At what point do we decide that server side MVC rendering trumps client side MVC rendering. Most of the customers we work with already have an instance of IIS running somewhere, so we would using use asp.net MVC, which obviously will do most of the HTML rendering on the server side. Even when using angular in combination with node the HTML rendering is server side.

But if we couple angular with IIS we can do full client side HTML rendering. At what point have others made the decision to use Client vs Server HTML Rendering? Are there concerns of slowness on mobile platforms?

What does the community say are the pros and cons of each scenario?

Thanks for the thoughts!

Answer 1

I've gone with a pure separation between the client and server. My server stack relies on PHP (using PDO and ph-pass) and MySQL for persistence. The major advantage in my view is the complete decoupling of the view/presentation from the server side logic. It is absolutely clear in my application that the PHP generates data and returns it formatted as JSON and accepts JSON formatted parameters but has nothing to do with the display (it just creates data structures that are easily parsed on the front-end).

On the front end I'm using AngularJS, UI Bootstrap (angular wrapper for bootstrap), Google Maps V3 Javascript api (wrapped in an angular directive), and D3js (again wrapped in an angular directive).

The few sites I've worked on haven't really encountered any issues on mobile... even when doing some pretty heavy data processing on the front end... I do all my filtering and some aggregation in the client side code for displaying filterable markers on a map and to draw some charts. Unfortunately the app I'm currently referring to is about a week from being made live so I can't show a link ATM.

Here's my main site though, this one isn't dependent on any PHP so all Angular: http://www.intellectual-tech.com

You can also check out the portfolio sites and http://www.shanklandfinancial.com I did all of these with just AngularJS and no server side code. The site that does rely on a database but is still WIP is http://www.eat-data.org

The longest delay is still in fetching the initial data which is in the 60kb range after gzipping. On mobile the google maps drags things down quite a bit and CSS animation isn't smooth/fast, but everything is still useable.

Another plus is if at some point I decide AngularJS isn't the way to go, or the client wants a native app, the server side code is all entirely re-useable without modification.

The only down side I see really is if the client wants to export the views I don't really have a good means to do that... I've recently used the PHPExcel library to output the data as XLSX files but in terms of charts etc. nothing in my server code is so fancy and would require overhaul if this was required. That said I don't think this is real problem that having printer friendly pages to be "printed to PDF" can't solve.