In an isomorphic single page application, what happens to clients when you deploy new server code?

Question

I think it's implicit that when implementing an isomorphic single page app that you've also developed a private api that your client will hit for updates.

My question is, when you push code changes to your server, there will be "stale" clients out there that are still running your old client code, and then hit your api with a possibly incompatible parameters and assumptions.

I see two possible solutions:

1. Version your api. Your client code will have to hit the api with its current version number; your server code gets bloated with versioning logic.
2. Implement some kind of sockets/push messaging to tell clients to do a full-page refresh to get the latest deployed code whenever a deployment occurs. (Do these connections even remain intact after a server deployment?)

(Api versioning is a necessity if you also have mobile app clients to support, but for just a web site, seems like a lot of unnecessary work.)

Anyone else encounter or solve this problem? Are there other options I'm missing?

Answer 1

I would suggest a combination of the two techniques. I would recommend versioning the API, and then having a version check that gets executed by the server on ever API call. If the version is not equal to the latest version you send a message back to the client that notifies them to do a full refresh.

This way your code shouldn't get bloated with a bunch of different versioning logic. You can just create a validate function that gets called at the beginning of every call and returns a message to update if the client is out of date.