I am trying to create an MVC web app, without any MVC framework. What I've done is to make an index.html with a section were all the views are loaded, when a user wants them. This though creates the problem that when a user types a direct url like: www.foo.com/bar - it doesn't point him to the view bar. I know how to point the user to a webpage with a router file, but I don't know how to do it, when the view is only a part of a page and it is opened in another page. Can I do this with the router, or how can this be done?
For clarity I am running php on the server side and I use AJAX calls to get the views.
Since all the detail pages do not have a real page server side you need a server side component that rewrites the URLS to a frontcontroller page that loads the index.html and that bootstraps that page with the correct view.
I suggest to take a look at the mini PHP frontcontroller component Silex
If you do not want to use such a component you can always do this using something like apache rewrite rules and your own PHP landing page. This is rather simple for smaller MVC websites. If you're going to build a bigger one I suggest to pick a few smaller frameworks that each do one thing well. I have done this using Silex and Twig on the server side and jQuery and Knockout on the client side.
Related
Note: I am kind of new to web development so please help me through any misconceptions I might have.
I am trying to learn the MERN stack. As an example, I am trying to make a two page site with a homepage and an about page. I made a ./public folder and added an index.html and an about.html to that folder. Then I started by learning some basic express where I have this line which will let the server serve static files from the ./public folder:
// set static folder
app.use(express.static(path.join(__dirname, 'public', )));
After I felt good about this, I wanted to add React to my existing project. This is where I ran into some confusion. It seems like React doesn't allow multiple pages in my website; I saw this SO post. So, React is good for building single page applications. I also saw this YouTube video where the first three minutes explain the difference between traditional multiple-page applications and React SPAs. He stated that all the pages will be sent at one time and the react-router will intercept any page requests and re-render the browser with the pages it already received on the first page load.
So, finally we get to my question. Going back to my example, suppose my about page is VERY large, with a lot of text and images. Isn't that potentially wasteful if I load the homepage, but the server has to send the entire website including the large about page, even though I might never even click on the about page? Once it is all loaded, I understand that the client has a smooth experience going from one page to the next without having to contact the server. But doesn't it mean that the client experiences long initial wait times. And, isn't this wasting server resources by sending pages the user might never click on. And the problem only seems to get worse the more unique pages the website has.
"He stated that all the pages will be sent at one time and the react-router will intercept any page requests and re-render the browser with the pages it already received on the first page load."
This is an oversimplification that is at the root of your misunderstanding.
Your react app is going to be a small amount of HTML that acts as the document root, and then a fair amount of CSS and JS. This JS React app will execute to generate your pages based on how you have configured your views and wired them to any data model. Generally with a SPA like this, you will load one view at a time, and it will, if applicable, make a request to the server for any data it needs to render, which will generally be returned as JSON. Once the JSON is received, it will get parsed in the browser into the data model and the UI will update to reflect the new state of the data model. Critically, each view (if wired correctly) will only fetch data from the server when the view loads; furthermore, any images or other assets in the UI will only be loaded when the UI renders them, so there will be no prefetching that wastes resources.
Because the react components can basically act as templates, you can actually save bandwidth in this way. Say you had 100 product pages on your site that were identical except for the product information. If you were to serve a new HTML document for each page there would be duplicated bandwidth in the markup sent each time. However, in React you can define a single <ProductPage /> component that will fetch only the product information and load it into the markup template each time, removing the issue of sending duplicate HTML.
There are also additional ways to split up your react app using tricks like lazy loading, to only fetch the salient JS when it is about to be used.
So, no, using a React app does not mean that it fetches all the HTML pages and assets for the site all at once. While one could write a React app in a wasteful manner, most properly structured React apps should be smaller than the rendered totality of the site.
I am using react-router-dom in my react project.
I am trying to programmatically navigate to a new parameter using: history.push("/newparam")
But the problem is navigating like this, isn't refreshing my page. Looks like its doing fake client
side routing. But I want to refresh my browser when I am navigating programmatically.
So how can I do something like a server-side routing using react-router-dom, where the page will refresh when the site will change url?
When you use react-router the complete routing is handled by the react on client side, So the server is responsible to only load the index of the frontend application, This is a normal behavior in Single page application. We do all the communication with the server using XHR calls. Using history.push("/newparam") or <Link route='/newparam' /> is always going to load the page from client side.
I dont exactly know what your usecase, But if you want the page to reload every time you navigate to a new page, use html <a> tag, This will initiate server side rendering. The JS equivalent of this would be window.location.href = '/your-redirect-url';
Let me know what exactly is your use-case so that I can help you further
I have a single page application - which means everything on the server gets redirected to a single index.html file which does the heavy lifting and routing using the HTML5 history api (pushstate).
Now, I want to add a new landing page to the side - let's call it landing.html and I want clients to first get to landing.html when they access / and index.html if they access any other route.
Now IE9 does not support the HTML5 history API, so using "hash urls" paths like /books/authors become /#!/books/authors in it. Since the hash section of the URL is not sent to the server as far as the server is concerned all paths are / which means I can't route to landing.html or index.html based on that logic.
I've thought of a hack - redirecting URLs with / to landing.html, detecting #! on the client, adding a cookie on the server (or client) called notReallyHomePage and redirecting to the correct page based on the cookie on the server. This is really hacky and not a good solution.
What would be the correct way to deal with routing in this case?
My backend is in ASP.NET MVC but I don't think that's relevant to the question
Hmmmmm... What's the content of landing.html? From its name I'm guessing it's a pretty simple page.
Couldn't you have its contents be a part of index.html and hide/show it according to the "first time user" logic?
Or if landing.html is some weird page created by your marketing or something, then place it in an iframe which hides/shows according to the same logic.
(obviously when you show landing.html then you hide index.html)
For rapid prototyping of my concepts, I'm using Express with Mongo and so far have set up a mongostore cookie storage system.
My question: Is it possible, after logging in/authenticating/etc, to have everything occur on the same page, aka '/game'? I still want multiple views and routes to be rendered, but using different areas of the screen, or overwriting elements on the screen, with the base game.jade still visible.
I essentially want to have the user on the same URL the entire time, but still use multiple routes and views. I looked into stuff like '/game/:stuff' but that still changes the URL I think.
FYI this is called a single-page web application.
One common way to do this is to route to different views using the hash token. For example, all of the following URLs would be part of the same page:
/game#introScreen
/game#level1
/game#level2
Your client code can respond to changes in the hash portion of the URL and change the display accordingly. The page does not reload and all your JavaScript code (and variable state) remains in place.
If you're using a framework like angularjs it can help do the routing for you.
I'm currently working on a social app using Angular. I'd be keen to have public, search engine indexable pages to accompany the app, such as an indexable homepage, about page and contact page.
What would be the best way to go about this? I'm undecided what my backend infrastructure is going to be, but it either going to be one of the following:
nginx/apache server to vend all content with an external pub/sub service for realtime.
Separate service for both front end and backend - nginx server vending front end content. Separate node server for backend socket stuff.
Any advice on this would great. I'm keen to figure out whether angular handles all of the routing, or whether i handle the static routes separately. This is my first time playing with Angular.
Cheers.
I might be wrong but I think your problem is not an AngularJS one, it's more fundamental than that.
Your issue is one where you are loading HTML content via AJAX. And how does Google etc. crawl AJAX loaded content if it can't execute JavaScript?
This might help:
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/
This might help too but its geared towards .NET: http://gregorypratt.github.com/Ajax-Crawling/
If you provide a solution where you let AngularJS do the routing but you still are able to serve static content from the server when ?_escaped_fragment_= is present in the URL then you're good to go. You get single page app benefits whilst still being crawlable.
The following is an example site using AngularJS routing and static content being served for Google et al.
http://artelier.co.uk/#!/about
http://artelier.co.uk/?_escaped_fragment_=/about (turn off JS to see it work)