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I’ve got an old app I wrote in Node, Mongo, Express and Handlebars. It seems to be a bit outdated in the sense that it was more static and all data was called locally off the same domain and rendered with Handlebars on the server side, which I thought was always necessary for SEO and it wasn’t built with the idea of later building and connecting the data to a mobile version.
I’ve been using React a lot lately as well as looking into building mobile apps and with the tutorials out there, it seems like most apps these days are designed in a way that the backend is mostly a remote api with cross site origin requests enabled and a frontend that just gets the data from it and parses it on the frontend whether it’s a desktop client or a mobile client.
What would be the best way to modernize my old app that’d keep it rendering on the server side using react instead of handlebars for SEO, while also having an api service for if I were to develop a mobile version that could get and parse the data?
There’s a lot of server side rending react tutorials out there, but I’m not sure what the best approach is.
2
Answers
To turn your current app into a SSR (server side rendered) react application would be a big ask.
You would have more luck ripping out the html / handle bars response and just returning JSON instead, effectively turning it into an API.
In terms of adding a SSR react layer, the easiest option would be to use something like Next.JS. This does the heavy lifting for you to create server side rendering. There are plenty of other options out there but Next is one of the best and probably the easiest to get going with.
You would then make API calls from your SSR Next / React app to the Node API.
You can reuse the same API for a mobile application if you chose to go down that path at a later stage.
You would then make API calls from your SSR Next / React app to the Node API.
You can reuse the same API for a mobile application if you chose to go down that path at a later stage.