Yes, another case of old school web dev making a comeback. “HTML over the wire” is basically server-rendered templates (php, erb, ejs, jinja), sent asynchronously as structured data and interpreted by React to render the component tree.
What’s being done here isn’t entirely new. Turbo/Hotwire [1], Phoenix LiveView, even Facebook’s old Async XHP explored similar patterns. The twist is using JSX to define the component tree server-side and send it as JSON, so the view model logic and UI live in the same place. Feels new, but super familiar, even going back to CGI days.
>What’s being done here isn’t entirely new. Turbo/Hotwire [1], Phoenix LiveView, even Facebook’s old Async XHP explored similar patterns.
Right, that's why it's in the post: https://overreacted.io/jsx-over-the-wire/#async-xhp
Likewise with CGI: https://overreacted.io/jsx-over-the-wire/#html-ssi-and-cgi
Agree there's echoes of "old" in "new" but there are also distinct new things too :)
Right? Right. I had similar thoughts (API that's the parent of the view? You mean a controller?), and quit very early into the post. Didn't realize it was Dan Abramov, or I might've at least skimmed the 70% and 99% marks, but there's no going back now.
Who is this written for? A junior dev? Or, are we minting senior devs with no historical knowledge?