Sprinkle Sharing

Deniz Akşimşek

When people talk about code sharing between server and client, the usual suspects are Node.js and sharing model classes. However, there's often good reason to duplicate these.

A far more interesting type of code sharing to me is eliminating this duplication:

When you are writing a server-driven web app with "sprinkles" of JS, you want to have interactive components, but also deliver usable HTML to non-JS-enabled1 clients. This means you are essentially writing a component with the first render and subsequent updates are written in different languages -- HTML then JS. How to make this nicer? (Existing answers follow)

Alpine and similar

Write both in one language: "HTML with JS inline in special attributes".

React and similar

Write both in one language: "JS optionally with JSX". Hard to set up sprinkle style, but wasn't this how it was originally created to be used?

  1. "Non-JS-enabled" includes not only browsers where the user turned off JS, but also times when the JS didn't load, or errored due to use of unsupported modern features.