Can airbnb's hypernova tool be used for angularjs web seo?

Question

Now Airbnb have a tool Hypernova for server side rendering of javascript views. I would like to know if it can be used for enhancing SEO of Ajax based website like the tool Prerender is used for. If not then why?

Answer 1

A quick way to figure out the way how a tool works is to check its dependencies. It doesn't contain phantom or other adapter for headless browser, so it just evaluates client-side scripts in Node.js.

hypernova runs client-side scripts in Node.js and renders them to HTML. In order to make this possible, scripts should be universal and don't depend on browser-specific features. This allows to avoid the overhead that is caused by rendering in headless browser (like Prerender does).

hypernova documentation is focused on using React components because they are naturally universal and most time don't require real DOM when being rendered in Node.js, They are rendered with hypernova-react package, which is a thin wrapper over React's own SSR features.

AngularJS was developed to run in a browser and relies on real DOM. It is guaranteed to work properly only on client side. It's possible (at least in theory) to render AngularJS application in Node.js with DOM emulation (jsdom) or jQuery emulation (cheerio), but hypernova doesn't offer a suitable adapter for that.