Ember.js on the server

Question

I'm developing a very dynamic web application via ember.js. The client-side communicates with a server-side JSON API. A user can make various choices and see diced & filtered data from all kinds of perspectives, where all of this data is brought from said API.

Thing is, I also need to generate static pages (that Google can understand) from the same data. These static pages represent pre-defined views and don't allow much interaction; they are meant to serve as landing pages for users arriving from search engines.

Naturally, I'd like to reuse as much as I can from my dynamic web application to generate these static pages, so the natural direction I thought of going for is implementing a server-side module to render these pages which would reuse as much as possible of my Ember.js views & code.

However - I can't find any material on that. Ember's docs say "Although it is possible to use Ember.js on the server side, that is beyond the scope of this guide."

Can anyone point out what would be possible to reuse on the server-end, and best practices for designing the app in a way to enable maximal such reuse?

Of course, if you think my thinking here doesn't make sense, I'd be glad to hear this (and why) too :-)

Thanks! C.

Answer 1

Handlebars - Ember's templating engine - does run on the server (at least under Node.js). I've used it in my own projects.

When serving an HTTP request for a page, you could quite possibly use your existing templates: pull the relevant data from the DB, massage it into a JSON object, feed it to handlebars along with the right template, then send the result to the client.