Are there any performance drawbacks when rendering DOM views at runtime with JavaScript, rather than rendering server-sent HTML?

2012-01-03T18:54:00+00:00

My answer to Are there any performance drawbacks when rendering DOM views at runtime with JavaScript, rather than rendering server-sent HTML? on Quora

Yes, there is quite a significant impact on first-load performance. The browser has to pull down all of the linked scripts before it can display any content - if you're using a library like jquery that's a sizeable chuck of code that has to be loaded and executed just on its own.

Modern browsers may be screamingly fast at executing JS, but modern devices aren't: mobile phones are significantly slower than desktop devices for this kind of thing.

There's a trade-off in the other direction as well of course - if you are loading subsequent content via ajax performance on further clicks will be better than if you were doing full page refreshes.

To summarise: yes it absolutely affects performance, but that doesn't mean you should avoid it.

Tags: javascript, web-development, quora, backbone

Annotated backbone.js

2010-10-13T17:24:00+00:00

Annotated backbone.js

Literate programming.

Tags: javascript, backbone, recovered

Backbone.js

2010-10-13T17:23:00+00:00

Backbone.js

As should be expected for a DocumentCloud project, Backbone is a concise, elegant and educational take on the JavaScript MVC pattern. Depends on Underscore.js and plays well with jQuery.

Tags: documentcloud, javascript, jquery, mvc, underscore, backbone, recovered

Simon Willison's Weblog: backbone

Are there any performance drawbacks when rendering DOM views at runtime with JavaScript, rather than rendering server-sent HTML?

Annotated backbone.js

Backbone.js