Enhance: SSR for Web Components

Interview:

What's the focus of the work these days?

These days we're driving towards finding focus for our customers in the front-end of web development. In the past few years, we've been working hard on figuring out how to bring the back-end more towards the front-end. The back-end traditionally has been tough to do. Lots of complexity. Servers, caching servers, database servers, infrastructure is code. And the front-end has been subsuming a lot of this work. And we think that the recent advances in cloud, cloud functions in particular, have given us the capabilies to bring down a lot of that complexity, adding backend dev into the front-end developer's toolbox.

What's the motivation for your talk?

My talk is in some ways a little bit of a throwback, and in some ways, it's about the future. So in the current state of front-end web development, things have gotten pretty complex. There's a lot of different JavaScript frameworks and there's a lot of different libraries and big ecosystems. These all rose up in the last generation of browsers because browsers weren't super great at dealing with the demands of more immersive experiences, and especially experiences that had to span multiple devices like mobile and desktop.

For us, increasingly, we've seen people struggle with these tools. So each of these different ecosystems tends to ship these days with transpilars. So you don't author web standard languages. You author in some higher level dialect. Then you compile it into web standards. In theory, that's going to run everywhere and work great, and a lot of the time it does. The problem is, as you add more and more code you get dependencies conflicting across different versions, and frequently breaking changes. The code is brittle. Worse, these different high-level dialects are not interoperable, and can't really have a React application inside of an Angular application. It'd be possible to bring all these things together, but it gets messy and the resulting code is very fragile.

The ultimate realization we've had is that a lot of this is just not necessary anymore. Web browsers are very good now. They're evergreen, so they're auto updating and they are backwards compatible. So the question we asked a few years ago is could our code be backwards compatible? Does it have to be compiled and do we have to deal with these incompatible ecosystem issues? The answer is no, we don't.

Now, the web has improved a lot in the last few years, and in particular, JavaScript got modules and we got web components. So we can compose applications now using just pure web standards, which means our apps would be backwards compatible and auto updating. Just a nice feature. So the talk is going to be a lot about these topics and why you should care and how you can move faster without having to deal with broken tool chains.

How would you describe the persona and level of the target audience for this session?

This is an interesting question. So at a high level, I would say this is a talk for Web developers and that is all of us these days. You're building software, you're probably building it for the Web in some fashion. But as you know, there's a lot of different kinds of developers. Some developers are more focused on the back-end. Some developers are more focused on the front-end. I believe that there's something for everyone here. We make a lot of assumptions, but our technology moves fast, and I think these two disciplines are also starting to come together more and more. Full-stack developers are Web devs that are able to participate in both the front-end and the back-end.

Is there anything specifically that you'd like this persona to walk away with after watching your presentation?

I think the big thing I'd like for them to find out is that we can use techniques like progressive enhancement, which are older techniques built for the browser today, and get great fast performance, deeply immersive experiences without sacrificing accessibility or render performance initially. So it'll be a pretty deep talk and it seems like we'll be talking about older technology, but we're going to take a new spin on it using the latest toys with Web Components and browser native JavaScript modules.