How Basecamp Next got to be so damn fast without using much client-side UI

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to-be-so-damn-fast-without-using-much-client-side-ui

by pors • 14 years ago

428 126 14 years ago

ayanb2• 14 years ago

Cross posted from a comment by DHH on this post

>> We use nodejs for local development via Sam’s Pow server, but there’s no nodejs in Basecamp Next itself. It’s all Ruby on Rails. We’re running the default stack using Rails 3.2+, MySQL 5.5, Memcached, a tad of Redis (mostly for Resque), ERB , test/unit, CoffeeScript, Sass, and whatever else is in the default box you get with Rails.

mattmanser• 14 years ago

Hmm, degraded development experience of doing everything on the client?

Bit of a bizarre claim there given the state of templating these days. Sounds more of a prejudice than an actual problem.

Also json tends to be much lighter than HTML and if you're taking an optimistic view of updates you can assume the action's been a success and even immediately update the display without waiting for the server to create some simple HTML, so it's arguably a worse user experience due to the lag.

dhh9• 14 years ago

We've found that the additional overhead of sending HTML vs JSON is negligible in most cases. The additional speed gained by just sending JSON across is not worth the programming enjoyment hit of doing everything client-side.

When you get below 50-100ms per action, things are generally fast enough that this is not a key problem any more. The user cares greatly if you can go from 800ms to 100ms, but not so much if you can go from 100ms to 70ms.

MatthewPhillips4• 14 years ago

Programming enjoyment is, of course, subjective, but for your team the enjoyment is ruby, understood :)

What browsers are you getting the 50-100ms numbers? Similar results on mobile (with a 3G connection)?

ayanb2• 14 years ago

How does this impact if you are aiming to build a JSON API too?

zaidf2• 14 years ago

I have to agree here. A major problem with client-side json is the need for additional documentation and likelihood of things breaking because of simple html edits.

For example, if you are populating a bunch of divs inside a parent div with the data returned using json, you would describe this using something like jquery selectors. Now if someone else comes and moves around the div during a redesign, he must go through whole bunch of js to make sure his shuffling of the divs around won't break the jquery selectors populating the data from json.

Now think about having a parent div that is simply populated with returned HTML from server-side and it seems way easier than using json to populate the data.

cicloid• 14 years ago

How about HTML versus MessagePack ( http://msgpack.org/ )?

condiment• 14 years ago

Your comment ignores the next section in the article, detailing how they are caching templates with a high level of granularity, and actively removing template logic that impedes efficient cacheing.

The article goes on to state that delivery times for cached segments of HTML are under 50ms in most cases. While I agree that it would be possible for them to improve the user's perception of the app performance even further via JSON or client-side updates, with the level of performance they described that type of improvement is unnecessary and introduces additional vectors for bugs to creep into production code.

MatthewPhillips4• 14 years ago

Stacker sounds like AJAX as it was done in 2006, except trigger by pushState. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it though. I'd be curious what the performance penalty is on mobile.

latch6• 14 years ago

Well, it's really stacker + pushState + MAX cache.

But why would there be a performance penalty? Doesn't this result in the client doing _less_ work all around? Less work than the multi-page approach...and less work from the client-side templating approach, no?

asaeidi2• 14 years ago

Seems it's a highly refined version of what was done in the "old" days. I remember doing something similar for an old project in ASP.NET. (Well more similar to pjax)

As to performance on mobile, i think it might all depend on how large the html fragments are.

jd• 14 years ago

When you have a persistent page (that you update with HTML5 push-state) you suddenly have to worry about issues like memory fragmentation. If you do lots of small updates to build a page from a template + JSON every time the user navigates it's easy to hit some situation where everything starts lagging for no clear reason.

If you simply swap out a large part of the page with some HTML right out of an Ajax request you don't have to worry about any of that.

arturadib4• 14 years ago

Let's be fair - poorly designed code causes memory bloat whether you're on the client or on the server-side.

Also, garbage collection efficiency in browsers is a metric of fierce competition among browsers. It's superb already, and it's getting awesomer by the minute. It's a safe choice for the future.

Joeri5• 14 years ago

And when you do everything client-side, you have to worry about memory leaks. Where the state is, is where the memory pain is.

arturadib4• 14 years ago

Exactly what I thought. But you have to remember that 37 is the quintessential Rails shop - client-side logic is not their sweet spot.

So it's only natural that for their flagship product they'd rather keep pushing the limits of their comfort zone rather than go all out client-side, no matter how natural that choice might be for a "web app".

jondot3• 14 years ago

With all of the backbone and node.js hype going around, people tend to forget that client-side development is developing on the client's side. Sooner than later you will have to deal with

* nondeterministic testing,

* interactive testing (leaving machines on to run interactive testing at night),

* most of the bugs will live on the client side,

* you'll have to support each and every machine's quirks (you can't pretend everyone are on at least core i5 and chrome, people WILL have machines that do javascript client side template rendering SLOWLY).

* you'll have to find ways to diagnose problems at the client's site, and you will maintain a fleet of various computer configurations to run sanity on.

* which will also cause you to start investing in pairwise testing

* i can go on

DHH is COMPLETELY right. Just because the universe is not ready enough for client side "SPA"s (universe=browsers,internet)

I'm laying my arguments out of experience - I've been a long time Ruby/Rails/.Net/JVM server side dev as well as enterprise software dev (enterprise desktop/workstation application suites, as complex as visual studio and the sorts). I have several node.js projects in production and I'm also doing a couple of projects with Backbone.

boucher2• 14 years ago

Your arguments are a checklist of responsibilities for anyone running any web software, whether the actual DOM elements are being rendered on the server or the client.

jarrett• 14 years ago

Very true. This is why I'm sticking with a server-heavy design (i.e. Rails) for my main projects. I agree with all of your arguments about the difficulties of testing. And I'd add that there's a distinct lack of tools for testing client-side. Sure, you can get unit tests for client-side JS, and you can run integration tests in Selenium etc.. But the client-side testing ecosystem is tiny and immature compared to that for server-side testing. This will all change, but for now, I don't envy anyone who has to test a heavily client-side app.

Joeri5• 14 years ago

You can still do unit testing of your client-side code if you wrap everything in components that separate state from rendering. The rendering itself you can only test with a human looking at the page anyway (or by comparing to reerence renderings). Extjs uses this approach. I can easily unit-test my forms written on top of extjs.

Fundamentally this is a bikeshedding debate. Whether you're programming on the client or server, the tools are equally capable. The big difference is the server puts you closer to the data, and the client pus you closer to the user. Either way you're struggling with latency, and you do different trade-offs, and either way you reach your goals.

espeed• 14 years ago

_johnny• 14 years ago

Interesting. We've just had a discussion in our team about moving as much as possible to the client becasue... developers enjoy writing CoffeeScript!

fleaflicker• 14 years ago

This is very similar to what Google+ does with Closure Templates.

latch6• 14 years ago

I have to say, reading this made my day. I've been feeling such a push towards client-side templates lately, that I felt like it was just me that didn't get it. I really don't understand what's so compelling - unless those exact same actions are actually (YAGNI) used as endpoints of a web service. render :partial => '..' is such an sweet, simple and natural paradigm to web programming.

dos12• 14 years ago

In my head it's much easier to imagine manipulating a UI based on objects and their state, rather than partial snippets of HTML. It seems like it would get complicated to track the pieces of html you needed to request in order to redraw only portions of the UI. Wouldn't there still be a lot of javascript involved with that logic?

rgoddard• 14 years ago

Normally that basic cycle would go: 1. I need to view some data, if I do not already have it, request it. 2. Generate html from data 3. Take generated html and place in appropriate place on page.

This skips step 2 by requesting the required html rather then the raw data. Step 2 is the part that would require the most code.

roc2• 14 years ago

> "I really don't understand what's so compelling - unless those exact same actions are actually (YAGNI) used as endpoints of a web service"

Well of course it's not going to appear all that compelling after you rule out the most compelling use case.

latch6• 14 years ago

Hey, I totally agree that if your actions are gonna be consumed by clients other than your own UI, it makes total sense. However, I've seen people [strongly] advocating this approach even when this isn't the case..that's what I don't get.

bdittmer• 14 years ago

I think you nailed it with "unless those exact same actions are actually (YAGNI) used as endpoints of a web service". I find client side javascript apps compelling because they are simply another consumer of your web service along with any other mobile/third-party/customer apps.

adeelk2• 14 years ago

It’s not just client-side apps where you can consume your own API. It’s completely possibly to do the consumption on the server side.

jshen• 14 years ago

This ia a bit of a tangent, but Stacker feels like breadcrumbs that require more real estate than necessary. Maybe the physical metaphor is important, but my first thought was 'this is just bread crumbs'.

jashkenas3• 14 years ago

This is all fascinating ... but does it feel like a sustainable approach going forward, or more like a turbo-charged horse and buggy?

Developer happiness aside -- there are plenty of folks who like JavaScript just as much as Ruby -- and assuming that we're talking about an non-public-facing app (like Basecamp Next), is there still an argument that can be made in favor of doing your UI on the server side?

Even just in principle, it can't possibly be close to as fast (client-side can render optimistically, where possible), and it can't be close to as flexible (you don't have a model of state on the client to perform logic with).

I think that the truth of this is already admitted in that the really fancy bits of UI are being implemented in JS: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3094-code-statistics-for-base...

latch6• 14 years ago

I don't understand why "it can't possibly be close to as fast"? Is the idea that with client-side templating, you've distributed the rendering?

But returning a cached html fragment is the exact same amount of work on the server as returning a cached-json value. Plus, it's less work for the client to drop the already-rendered html into a container than to have to bind the model to the template.

I feel like I'm being super dumb, but to me this approach is going to result in faster rendering.

MatthewPhillips4• 14 years ago

Don't overlook the bandwidth overhead of html fragments vs. json snippets. That issue is magnified on mobile.

Additionally, if you are doing small updates the DOM API is faster than injecting .innerHTML. I think this has changed in recent years and .innerHTML might have caught up for larger nodes. I personally still use the DOM API because it encourages more simplistic layouts.

VMG2• 14 years ago

A small change in state can cause a large change in the view.

When the server renders the html, it has to send all the portions of the view that have changed. When rendering client-side, the server only needs to send the portion of the state that changed.

ColinCampbell• 14 years ago

The important thing is that client-side rendering stays on the client and doesn't need to go back to the server. If you have any noticeable latency (read: everything on mobile, desktop clients not close to a server), needing to go back to the server to render will ruin the perceived performance of your app. Well-written applications running on the client can take a change and optimistically render that before the change has even been persisted back to the database. This is inherently faster. If you're able to invest in the infrastructure to allow you to do this on the server, and your use cases allow you to make that decision, then the trade-off is a little less black and white.

Joeri5• 14 years ago

The big advantage of client-side rendering is that you can break out of the mindset of outputting blobs of html from templates. You can think in terms of ui elements and the business logic that drives their creation and updates. Once in that mindset, you can think about how to prefetch data and store it locally to not have to go to the server for every ui update. If you're doing it right, many actions don't require going to the server at all.

boucher2• 14 years ago

Word. Seems like they are going out of their way to avoid doing client side work even when it would be far easier to do so. Also seems motivated by the desire to keep Rails relevant, but without actually trying to evolve Rails towards being more useful for client side driven apps.

On the flip side, you have to congratulate them on what seems like really great results. I'm definitely in favor of doing what works and what you're comfortable with. I just don't think Basecamp Next Next will be written this way.

alinajaf2• 14 years ago

> Also seems motivated by the desire to keep Rails relevant, but without actually trying to evolve Rails towards being more useful for client side driven apps.

IME, there isn't a smoother way to implement a bunch of RESTish json endpoints hooked up to a database (resources) and have dependency management and compilation for your frontend js/css (via the asset pipeline).

There may be other frameworks out there that make serving up and delivering client-side driven apps easy, but I haven't heard of them.

dhh9• 14 years ago

I'm not sure what qualifies as sustainable or not in your book. We've achieved our speed goals (sub 100ms pages for the most part), our development goals (Ruby, Rails, server side pleasure), and our UI goals (app that feels like a web page, not just a single-page JS app).

I'm sure Flash or Silverlight or other RIA people would argue that anything that's not a compiled native experience isn't as flexible or as fast as whatever they're peddling. Meh.

Yes, it's great to occasional dip into advanced client-side when that's needed. Just like Flash had its legitimate use cases here and there. But for the bulk of the UI interactions we're giving people, it's just not needed (or desired).

arturadib4• 14 years ago

DHH - if you guys keep working so hard on your custom platform one day you just might be able to reproduce the client-side JSON+JavaScript stack!

Keep up the hard work!

jashkenas3• 14 years ago

By "sustainable" I'm getting at the point that if you're already doing 50/50 Ruby/JavaScript ... it makes you wonder which direction that ratio will tend to go in the future. Will Basecamp Next Next still be rendered as chunks of HTML that are sent over the wire to be inserted into specific spots on the page in 2015?

Either way, I'm very much looking forward to using the new version.

arijo• 14 years ago

Also, bashing javascript client-side frameworks makes great link bait.

ThomPete• 14 years ago

I think that is kind of a strawman.

Neither flash, flex or silverlight are being pushed these days for these kind of services.

Like the new design and with that I don't mean so much how it looks but more how it looks like it's going to feel using it.

Void_2• 14 years ago

I think in most cases it will be more than 100ms. Much more than that. Just latency to basecamphq.com is 350ms from here (Europe.)

mhartl• 14 years ago

app that feels like a web page, not just a single-page JS app

I think this is a key point and is one reason that server-side approaches will be relevant for a long time to come. Some applications, such as Gmail and Pivotal Tracker, feel a lot like desktop apps, and heavy use of client-side code is a necessity in these cases. But many—I'd argue the vast majority—of web applications produce a better user experience when they feel like ordinary web pages. I don't see that changing any time soon.

nathansobo• 14 years ago

Agreed. I prefer writing UI code on the client. But you need quality abstractions because it is more complex than doing everything on the server where all your data is at arm's length. I've written two frameworks that make it easier... SpacePen for the view (https://github.com/nathansobo/space-pen) and Monarch for the model: (https://github.com/nathansobo/monarch-rewrite)

romaniv3• 14 years ago

is there still an argument that can be made in favor of doing your UI on the server side?

Ability to link to documents, bookmark, meaningfully use history and save pages to the disk for offline use. Ability of the users to customize standard behaviors without reverse-engineering your JavaScript code. Transparency, which often leads to much, much easier debugging and improved usability. No need to run a quad-core 4GB desktop to use the website.

And this is just the stuff relevant to internal (non-public) websites. You can argue that all of this can be achieved with JavaScript heavy clients, but in reality, it's just isn't. It's not something you get by default, it's tons of extra work, and most people don't do that work.

In principle, server-side rendering can allow you to share pre-rendered components between thousands of users saving everyone tons of work. In practice, rendering on the server side is just string concatenation and is insignificant compared to things like running SQL quires, which you'll have to do anyway.

sourcefrog• 14 years ago

> Ability to link to documents, bookmark, meaningfully use history and save pages to the disk for offline use. Ability of the users to customize standard behaviors without reverse-engineering your JavaScript code. Transparency, which often leads to much, much easier debugging and improved usability. No need to run a quad-core 4GB desktop to use the website.

You can manipulate the page url/browser history from js, and you can use the url to set the application state. History and bookmarks work perfectly well in gmail, for example.

This does take explicit coding. But, if fragments of the page are being replaced as bcx does, then you need to do similar coding anyhow. Otherwise, you're doing whole page loads on every request.

js works pretty well on modest smartphones, at which level network latency is usually the major concern...

dgregd• 14 years ago

"but does it feel like a sustainable approach going forward"

Maybe you are right. However it it too early to do a big rewrite in JS. There are many JS frameworks but no clear leader. I am sure that in 3 years decision how to design you client side web app will be much easier.

asaeidi2• 14 years ago

Also what about deployments/bug fixes? Seems if you need to make changes to the html fragments you'd have to do a full app deploys every time. Versus making changes to specific JS file and uploading it.

Personally that's why i like this whole shift to single page apps. Just as we've decoupled certain aspects of the server-side development, we can do the same with the UI.

batista2• 14 years ago

Sure.

1) Client side UI frameworks are still immature. For example Backbone is minimal, while Ember is more featured but with bad documentation and not proven yet. Big frameworks with UI widgets never caught on and are too restrictive. GWT is also on the down and out, etc...

2) Same goes for the tools you need for debugging, unit testing, automation, etc. Nowhere as complete as the server side tools that have been honed for 10+ years.

3) Client experience can be extremely different, when JS performance differs widely between Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE versions. Not to mention not everybody supporting the history state API.

4) JS performance for long running pages can also vary, due to memory management.

and it can't be close to as flexible (you don't have a model of state on the client to perform logic with)

And on the client you don't have a model of the server (where the actual data are and where the actual actions are performed) to perform logic with.

robinduckett• 14 years ago

Aren't they are using a lot of client side UI code in order to replace parts of the UI with updated HTML from the server?

They have caching on the server side but that can only account for some of this.

Although in my couple of years of using Basecamp in my previous job, I never found it particularly "snappy" but then I was one user out of a team of five, out of how ever many users they have.

rkalla2• 14 years ago

Are you guys taking care to send as-plain-as-possible markup from the server to the client and then style it up to keep most the UI development in CSS or are you just sending through raw, styled HTML that gets inserted as-sent directly into the page?

This reminds me of the early days of Java Servlets when people would stream back HTML from inside their Java Servlet code to JSP pages to build it out... made it impossibly hard to edit the templates.

Then the Java world moved to templating engines, but it was still the same idea.

Just curious how you are managing this pain point (I am not a Ruby dev so maybe there is a well-known 'best practice' templating approach?).

dhh9• 14 years ago

I'm not sure I understand the pain point you're describing. What's "styled HTML"? We're sending HTML across the wire that looks exactly like the HTML we used to render the initial page. It has classes, ids, and custom data descriptors.

We have not experienced any pain doing this.

rkalla2• 14 years ago

You answered my poorly-worded question. Thanks.

hello_moto2• 14 years ago

I find GWT to be the best platform to do full-blown fat client-side paradigm due to several reasons:

1) UI Templating (like XAML)

2) MVP Pattern + JUnit = test automation as part of your build with minimum investment to infrastructure (most JS based solution requires investment on infrastructure)

3) Resource Bundle (similar to Asset Pipelining) cut down HTTP requests

4) Resource splitting (follow up from #3) to reduce the size of the responses when it comes to resources

5) JS binding (like C binding, C++ binding, JNI, etc) to support popular JS library

6) Top Notch Compiler (arguable... but it's there) that can also prune dead code

7) JS switching based on browser's request (IE browser will get IE-specific JS)

8) CSS variable substitution (like Sass)

9) History framework.

10) Flexibility: end point can either return JSON, XML, or use the built-in XML-RPC mechanism (Java only).

The disadvantages are: it's Java and requires compilation.

I like GWT the most so far because I don't have to find libraries or tools that support all of the above (Sass, mustache, various js unit-testing tools, library to merge and compile css/js, etc).

YMMV.

bradleyjg• 14 years ago

I like GWT as well, but its development history makes me a bit nervous about its future.

It is open source, but doesn't have a developer ecosystem outside of google employees (in fact they outright state that no one else can be a committer). That in itself wouldn't be the end of the world, but unfortunately google has a) reduced resources devoted to GWT dramatically in the last year or so (many team members were reassigned to the dart project), and b) has a history rapidly changing 'paradigms' and semi-abandoning the code and documentation for the old way of doing things.

hello_moto2• 14 years ago

I think the biggest danger of using GWT is when it breaks on newer browsers and this has happened once in the past with the release of Safari 4 (or 5?) there was a minor hiccup in which they quickly fix it the next day.

That is definitely a major glare. Other than that, if the community decided to fork it (and have the time and capability to do so) it'll be a safe choice for a long time.

GWT as of today is definitely very polished and well maintained and fulfil the needs of Single Page App smoother than having to hunt different tools and libraries and to set them individually to be a part of the build tool.

joshontheweb• 14 years ago

I can't help but feel that you are sacrificing the flexibility of your UI in order to stay in your 'safe place'. IMO its easier to implement complex UI if you can deal with it all in the front end. I have used a similar approach before and felt like my hands were tied many times by it.

abdelm• 14 years ago

or, you know, you can also stop using Rails.

gabyar• 14 years ago

Is Stacker a proprietary 37 Signals thing? It doesn't seem to pop up after several search attempts.

latch6• 14 years ago

yes, the blog post was quite clear that it's built in-house, with no plans to open source it since it isn't a generic solution (it's purpose-built with Basecamp in mind).

adeelk2• 14 years ago

I think in the whole client-side rendering debate, a lot of people miss the fact that there is a one-to-one correspondence between JSON and a certain subset of HTML, that can be illustrated by the following example:

    {"user": {"first_name": "David",
              "last_name":  "Hansson"}}
    
    <div class="user">
      <div class="first_name">David</div>
      <div class="last_name">Hansson</div>
    </div>

If, as 37signals basically seem to be doing, you restrict yourself to this subset of HTML and use CSS to do _all_ presentational styling, then honestly it’s all the same either way.

edw519• 14 years ago

I love posts like this, not just for what OP has done, but for what you guys have to say about it. I'm continually asking myself 3 questions:

  1. Should I do it on the client or the server?
  2. What should be travelling between the client and the server?
  3. Based on the answer to #2, what else do I need on the client?

Even though I've read all your great discussion points, I'm not sure I'm that much smarter. But it's nice to know I don't suffer alone. :-)

alinajaf2• 14 years ago

+1, I'm also none the wiser having read the OP and the comments here.

I'm quite used to a fully server side model so I'm currently experimenting with a few side projects to see just how much I can put into the client without going anywhere near the server.

I think once I've pushed it to its limits I can start working my way back to the server and achieve a good balance. None of this would of course be bearable without coffeescript and a nice js framework like backbone.

irahul4• 14 years ago

> 1. Should I do it on the client or the server?

I think most applications use both client and server components. If your question is more on the lines of which one plays a major role, it depends mostly on the app. GMail won't be half as good without all the JS magic, but again, I assume it also has a heavy server component.

> 2. What should be travelling between the client and the server?

If you need any client side processing or are using a framework which works on raw data(backbone.js), then json/xml/...; or else if your goal is to run the app without reloading unnecessary parts, html is a better idea.

> 3. Based on the answer to #2, what else do I need on the client?

I am not sure what you are looking for here, but if your goal is to make a responsive app, there are some basic things to take care of.

Have bookmarkable links and don't break the back button. Doing that is breaking the base paradigm, and plain ajax does that.

Use something that provides bookmarkable links, and doesn't break the back/forwrad button; and at the same time, doesn't reload the whole page when only a small portion of the page needs reloading.

pjax is one such solution - the 37signals guys investigated it, then went with their home grown solution, but I think pjax will work just fine for majority of use cases.

The trick to pjax is serving content without layout if it is a pjax reques; with layout otherwise. There is nothing you can't handroll, but 1) why would you want to? 2) pjax uses pushState to preserve links and back button behavior.

Here is the pjax code:

https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax

And here is a gist in Flask/Python which shows conditionally including the layout:

https://gist.github.com/830fc28c680e77759b4b

mark_l_watson2• 14 years ago

Thanks you for the links. I found a simple Rails pjax app and I am going through the code right now: https://github.com/edison/pjax-rails-sample

Joeri5• 14 years ago

More important than whether to send html, json or xml is WHEN to send that content. People underestimate just how painful latency is to the user because they're sitting right next to their web server. Digg takes 15 times longer to load from bangalore than from california (see http://www.slideshare.net/kkjjkevin03/geographic-distributio... ). The thing that client-side rendering allows is caching your application UI in the browser and on the CDN. The server only gets contacted when it's absolutely necessary.

If you go mobile, it gets worse, because sometimes you'll lose the network for a few minutes, or even a few hours. Building a web app that keeps running in that scenario is possible, but only by embracing a client-side philosophy. In my personal opinion, mobile is going to be the dominant way that people connect, and the network is not going to be robust enough to render mobile web apps on the server.

tapertaper• 14 years ago

What's the point of putting the tl;dr at the bottom?

jarnix• 14 years ago

advertising

va_coder• 14 years ago

I don't think push state is supported in IE (except ie 10):

http://caniuse.com/#search=pushstate

This makes it a non-starter for me.

akavlie• 14 years ago

The app still works in IE, it just requires page refreshes on every page load.

iamleppert• 14 years ago

Awesome, very interesting article that shows you don't always have to go full client side to get a snappy app.

However, I do agree with another poster about this being a turbo charged horse and buggy. You can't, for example, deploy the app to a static CDN, or serve templates from a CDN. Templates can't be cached on the client, so you've developed what is essentially an elaborate partials caching infrastructure that is likely very brittle and must be watched over closely to maintain speed benefits (keeping all those things in mind when content changes -- what to throw out and what to keep, etc).

Also, by delivering HTML you're limiting your presentation to browser-only devices, at least with this app. I know basecamp has a JSON API, and at that point, why didn't you just do a traditional client side app I wonder? I think the answer rests in the fact that you preferred the "niceness" of server side development, which is arguably more mature than client side at the present time. If that's the only benefit, in a few years, do you think that advantage will hold true?

bjeanes• 14 years ago

> Alexander, I think the Law of Demeter is shit and never follow it.

Classic DHH

dreamdu5t• 14 years ago

Summary: Use window.pushState() to reduce HTTP requests and cache every thing.

kristianp• 14 years ago

I'm showing my ignorance of rails here, but is it hard to do the 'russian doll' style of fragment caching that DHH describes? Are there any gems that do this?

deepkut• 14 years ago

I just realized how "next last year" is an oxymoron... Or is it? A reference to the present per chance?

How Basecamp Next got to be so damn fast without using much client-side UI

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