Helpful tips from Google's Chromium team on making web app architecture decisions

With so many fancy and heavily-marketed web frameworks nowadays, you might have been as lost as me in making sense and evaluating each one of them to find the one most suited for your use case. This chart was especially helpful for me, hopefully you find it useful too!

One particular decision to make is with regards to where to implement application logic and rendering. There are a variety of approaches on the spectrum of server rendering to full client side rendering. Server rendering generates the full HTML for a page on the server. That avoids additional round-trips for data fetching and templating on the client. Drawback is the Time To First Byte is slower as generating pages on the server takes time.

Netflix’s hybrid approach is worth considering. They server render static landing pages, while prefetching the Javascript for interaction-heavy pages.

If you are doing client-side rendering, make sure you implement aggressive code splitting and lazy-load Javascript.

Also watch out for developments in making streaming server rendering and progressive rehydration work.

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