Server Side Rendering in Rails
GOTO Community Day Chicago 2023

Tuesday Oct 24
16:15 –
17:00
Trifork (Wayman 1)

Server Side Rendering in Rails

Server-Side Rendering (SSR) is a powerful technique for improving web applications, yet its integration with Ruby on Rails is an often overlooked approach. While Rails excels with enhancing pages with JavaScript, or bootstrapping Single Page Applications (SPAs), the potential of SSR remains underexplored. This presentation unravels this unique avenue, shedding light on how SSR seamlessly integrates with Rails, offering efficient, scalable, and maintainable web applications while adhering to Rails’ convention-driven philosophy.

While I’ll be focusing on introducing SSR techniques into Rails based applications, you’ll come away with invaluable insights into how SSR significantly impacts web development- agnostic of frameworks and languages. I’ll be diving into the benefits of SSR, including user experience, page performance, and SEO. You’ll come away with a deeper understanding of SSR and the confidence to reason about if it is the right fit for your applications.

Complex applications often necessitate complex rendering strategies. I’ll be walking through practical architectures that progressively introduce techniques and ideas- all of which merge seamlessly with existing frameworks- to demonstrate hybrid approaches and show a clear path forward for introducing SSR into existing or greenfields applications.

As with all areas of software development, the benefits come with trade-offs. I’ll guide you through the challenges of SSR, from intricacies in building and testing, to complexity in asset compilation and deployment, and highlight some common pitfalls and debugging strategies along the way.

Join me on this comprehensive journey of Server-Side Rendering and unlock a new set of skills to craft web applications that set new standards in performance, user experience, and SEO.