Disclaimer: I work at Netlify, so some of this post leans towards how to implement different rendering methods on Netlify. Other web platforms are ...
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I wish I could find the source code for the Visual Basic 6.0 static site generator I wrote back around 1999/2000. It stored content in an Access database. It even had support for managing a site which stored different pages on different hosting accounts (because I was hosting it on free Angelfire/Geocities accounts which only offered a couple of MB of space).
TRTYS! (This Rocks, Thank You Salma)
That's nice, Salma!
In addition to this post, I've written one about the Evolution of React Rendering Architectures. I think it fits well as a complementary article on this topic.
This article provides a clear and concise breakdown of the different types of rendering available on the web today. It covers the basics of static rendering, server-side rendering (SSR), client-side rendering (CSR), and static site generation (SSG). The article provides examples of when each type of rendering is best suited and highlights the benefits and drawbacks of each rendering method. Overall, this is a great resource for anyone looking to understand more about web development and rendering.
This post is clear for the explanations of accronyms. Thanks a lot!
Woahh thank you very much for the content! I'm so interested learning about the rendering paradigm. Currently learning on SPA and SSG. This article is very insightful for me, thanks!
Good luck!
Fwiw I recently wrote about the relationship between SPA and CSR (or more broadly between navigation and rendering):
dev.to/tbroyer/naming-things-is-ha...
I wrote something similar during the whole MPA vs SPA debate! dev.to/whitep4nth3r/single-page-ap...
Thank you for this breakdown of some of the VERY common acronyms swimming around in documentation, blog posts, forums, and comments.
I don't know but for me it looks quite sponsored.
Like why would you call it edge rendered when it is still server rendered but the server is at the edge? It is no difference where it runs, it is the same approach. That is totally marketing skills.
I won't say netlify is bad, it provides top class services. But it does no good when you just pollute terminologies like that.
It doesn't seem the same thing to me. ESR provides a mix of SSG and SSR. Meaning that you generate your pages with SSG, then a functional middleware modifies them on the fly (if necessary) adding small updates with minimal computation time.
A nice idea to me - maybe a little brittle as you need to change the updater function as you change the underlying page's structure.
You can definitely generate full pages using ESR, no doubt, but you're right — where Edge Functions really shine is with the ability to update static content on the fly, by intercepting the HTTP request.
There's literally a disclaimer at the very top of the post that says I work for Netlify 😅
Because that's the key difference here! There's definitely a difference to be seen in response times depending on where the function runs. The time it takes to for the response to make a round-trip from India, for example, to a fixed server location in the US is longer than the time it takes to make a round-trip from the closest server location to the origin of the request, which could indeed, be India.
There is also another key difference on Netlify between traditional serverless functions and Edge Functions. Serverless functions on Netlify run on Node, and Edge Functions run on Deno.