What if we have several apps built with Chaplinjs?

[ghost]

I see this important piece is missing in Chaplin framework to be able to render it on the server side. We have several apps built using Chaplin, just added some features which required us to thinking about SEO.

We wanted to use rendr to be able to render it both server and client. How can we convert our Chaplin apps to use rendr with minimal changes to it. I see all example apps written in javascript but in your blog and elsewhere you talk about coffeescript.

[mikepuerto]

ever consider https://prerender.io/ ? or are you guys stuck on Rendr?

[saponifi3d]

@deviceagility the biggest problems you'll run into for using Chaplinjs in Rendr is that you'll need the Chaplin base classes to extend Rendr classes, not Backbone. Because of that, you wouldn't be able to use Rendr + Chaplin out of the box.

[saponifi3d]

@deviceagility - do you have any other questions about this? One way you might be able to get around the above problem is to have your Base classes extend both Rendr and Chaplin's class. However this means you'll need to have a base calls for each overlapping class.

Let me know if you need any specific help with doing that or if you've found another way that's a bit cleaner.

[mikepuerto]

I wouldn't go through the trouble considering the state of Rendr. There are too many unresolved issues...

[raviada]

Thank you for all the feedback. We ended up implementing prerender.io solution for search engines. We are still contemplating if we stick with JS/AJAX site or rails server side app. It was easy for us to build the app quickly using Chaplin and all the Rest APIs were already written.

But more and more we are figuring out the issues with search engines and SEO in general, we may be better off with server side MVC, but that defeats the whole purpose of having an application feel vs website jumping from page to page. I am not sure if there is a right or wrong answer to this.

We have about 12M links need to be indexed. I am sure node server needs to handle such loads to prerender al the pages. Its crashing time to time.

[saponifi3d]

@mikepuerto what are some of the unresolved issues you're running into? I'm trying to go through and start working on as many of them as I can - trying to put together some sort of queue to start tackling the problems.