Can someone explain me what is so special about EmberJS Fastboot?

Question

There is a lot of buzz around EmberJS' Fastboot and I have been reading about it here.

However, I haven't gotten the whole idea:

1. What does it mean to "boot JavaScript apps on the serve"?
2. Why should it be done?

I have no experience in writing web applications. Nevertheless, I know that the server side handles requests from client by sending a JSON (e.g.) response. Then, the client takes it and mainly wraps it with HTML & CSS.

So why do I need to boot my JavaScript app?

Thanks.

Answer 1

FastBoot means all the client-side logic used to take the JSON (or whatever) from the API will be also run on-server so that upon first load, the client will have an already-rendered page rather than a delay for the rendering to take place on the client. Then the data and rendering will be passed off to the client.

It’s a modified version of the client running alongside the API server, consuming the same API as the browser client, used to improve snappiness on the client end. It would also serve proper sites to non-JavaScript clients like some web crawlers, curl, etc.

It might sound like a hassle to maintain two clients, but their aim is to make it near-painless for most applications.

You can listen to Tom Dale and Yehuda Katz on a recent podcast explaining it in more detail if you like.